A record drought & a yard full of trees

Trees: we need them more than they need us...and we ALL REALLY NEED SOME RAIN.

OK.

WHERE IS THE RAIN???

Why hasn’t it rained yet?? Is anyone else starting to get increasingly freaked out by the total lack of water falling from the sky?!?

I had a dream once that unhinged me for a few days. I’d woken up before sunrise and was making breakfast - boiling the tea, cooking toast, getting dressed - all the while waiting for the sun to appear like it always did. But I waited and waited and still it stayed dark. People started coming out of their houses, congregating in the street. Staring up at the pitch black sky, wondering, just as I was, where has the sun gone? And then it started to rise. But it wasn’t the sun as we knew it. It was a burnt out husk - a coal blackened ember that barely lit the earth. And all at once everyone realised that nothing else mattered - the wars, the petty squabbles, the last electricity bill. None of it mattered because the sun was dead and we were all about to be wholly, entirely screwed.

This feels a bit like that.

And of course it will rain... I guess. Probably. Surely.

But that’s not really the point, is it. Because even when (if) it does rain, it likely won’t rain as much, or for as long, and over the next ten, twenty years, none of us really has a clear idea of where this is all going.

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Sometimes I feel a bit despondent. Worried I’ve picked the wrong career path - after all, who is going to want to garden in a soon-to-be-desert? Who is going to stay motivated while their Polyphagous Shothole borer-infested trees are ripped out, one by one, leaving their garden bare and sunbaked once more?

And then I counter myself. Because what is the alternative? We give up? We head inside out air conditioned homes, stick a pool and some gravel out back and leave the birds and the skinks and the frogs, grasshoppers, bees, bobtails and butterflies to their own devices? Abandoned to battle it out in the baking hot world we built for them out of our own avarice?

I picked this job for myself because I love it. Because there is nothing more soothing to my neurotic mind than chucking something in the soil, and nurturing it, and watching it thrive. And because far too many people don’t realise just how valuable and life enhancing growing things can be and I wan’t to tell them. To show them much we need it. Like we need the sun, and the rain.

So giving up isn’t an option. We can’t accept a world devoid of trees, of bugs, of wildlife. What a catastrophically depressing world that would be. The only option is to double down. To try harder, plant smarter.

I’m not exactly sure how to do that yet. I feel like our methods of gardening are going to need to become much smarter, more tactical and more pragmatic over the years to come.

For now, there’s one easy thing we can do to at least mitigate some of the damage that has been done over the last year in WA thanks to the drought and the shot hole borers: we can plant some trees.

This obviously isn’t a silver bullet solution - if WA does indeed turn into a barren, desertified landscape it’s not going to be hospitable to trees either. But trees are at the very least more resilient to the changes in climate. In a suburban environment, with a bit of irrigation, they can make it through dry summers in one piece, while helping cool our homes and providing vital habitat for birds and other wildlife.

Its been said that if the current rates of tree losses due to the shot hole borers continue in WA at their current rate, we stand to lose 10 000 trees over the next four years. And it is becoming far too normal to drive through suburbs that have next to no tree cover. Nothing to dilute the hammering, blinding rays of the sun. I don’t want to live in a world like that. I want to live in a world with dappled shade, with bird song, with greenery. The way to get there is to plant tough trees that will stick out these next decade with us while we work out how to fix the mess we’ve made.

It also feels way better to do something in the face of my own creeping climate anxiety, and planting trees is something.

So, here’s a list of (almost) every tree in our garden.

AND if you are a paying subscriber, keep scrolling because at the end of this newsletter there is also a 30 minute video tour of our garden where I show you every single tree on the list.

These trees have provided us with food, brought birds into our garden, shaded and cooled the backyard and created a microclimate that has somewhat shielded the garden from the worst of the hot, dry summers (which means fewer deaths of the other, smaller plants that are growing in their shade).

The endless blue skies which - in spring - were something to be celebrated and relished, today bring me a slithering, sinking feeling of dread. But they can’t last forever. Winter has to arrive, eventually. Surely. The rain must come, in the end. And with it, the possibility of action, of growth.

So if you do one thing in your garden this winter, once the heavens have finally opened, plant a tree. Plant one of these:

(almost) all of the trees in our garden