Tonal eclipse of the sun - as seen at Knocking Hoe - projected through a kitchen colander onto a sheet of white card. I didn't want to buy a pair of special glasses (or go blind) so this simple variation on a pinhole camera did the job. In fact we frequently get brief glimpses of sun without going blind (not to mention admiring sunrises and sunsets). Nonetheless looking straight at the sun high in the sky for seconds or longer is clearly a no-no.

 My old buddy Gordon suggested we take a trip out to the Hoe. Good call- the primal humps of the Hoe speak to my inner pagan. We picked a spot looking over the patchwork fields of Bedfordshire. The landscape was golden brown, sky blue, electric heat.

 As the eclipse began to happen an eerie twilight spread across the land, the air became cool, the rays of the sun ceased to burn the skin. A different twilight to sunset, the shadows didn't lengthen as when the sun goes down.

 I have to report we didn't see the sun go dark with a bright corona. Throughout it seemed to remain a luminous circle despite the dimming of the ambient light. That is intriguing because every news report shows the image of a dark sun. Perhaps it's fake news like those stories we landed on the moon and the earth is round...  (just kidding)

 Then again it was a partial eclipse when seen from England; possibly sufficient rays were illuminating the haze that the sun still looked full? Anyway the merest of squints, the colander and the lens of the camera saw a shining sun. Maybe it would have looked different through those special glasses?

 Actually my particular purpose for this quest was to experience the change of light and atmosphere here on planet Earth and the effect was indeed uncanny. 

 

 Three drought/heatwave summers in the past five years bears out the contention that the Mediterranean climate will move northwards to the south of England. The epithet 'hardy' is traditionally applied to plants that can survive freezing temperatures as low as minus ten or twenty. Such winters were part of my childhood but rarely a consideration since then. Drought hardy becomes equally important these days 

 Certainly I will only be planting species noted for their drought tolerance be they native or naturalised. That doesn't mean we need to be growing cactuses in the Home Counties (yet?!) but there's no point assuming we can rely on summer rain or even have enough water to avoid hosepipe bans. Nonetheless they will need to be plants that can cope with cold and damp because that will still happen.  

 The parched grasslands of southern England are largely bereft of wildflowers in flower. For the most part they flowered early and faded early. So it is in the damper locales we get some greenery and a splash of vivd colour. Case in point Great Willowherb (Epilobium hirsutum) is plant of marshy margins, ditches and riversides. 

This is England: blue sky, green trees, straw-coloured grass.

 

 England's green and pleasant land has turned brown.

 

 There is no water shortage. What we have in this country is a storage shortage, probably because we never imagined we would run out of rain.  

  Water butts are a good idea -to a limited extent. This one holds up to 100 litres and is fed by the downpipe from a pitched roof approximately 6.5m long by 5m wide which is 35.75 square metres. Given the average rainfall in the region that roof will receive over 23,000 litres of water per annum! [the formula is 1 litre of water per square metre per mm of rain x average annual rainfall in mm]

 In fact I didn't rig this one up for storage; rather it collects the water from the roof to distribute round the garden. The tap with hose is always on so the water goes straight onto the garden (better that than down the drain into the sewer system). In an intense rainstorm it sometimes fills up faster than it empties so there is also an overflow hose at the top.

 100 litres is only 10-20 watering cans, a drop in the ocean so to speak. If we want to (or have to) get serious about water storage 1000 litres is probably the bare minimum. Even then a hosepipe would drain a full tank in an hour or so. That's ok if the tank is being topped up by regular rain but won't last long through a drought summer like this one.

 

Even the wildflowers are wilting but not this impressive display of Umbellifers.