It is unusually dry here. In fact our province of Taranaki went into official drought declaration some weeks ago. I was woken yesterday morning by the sound of rain and my instant response was relief but it stopped and I see it was only about half a millimetre so that did absolutely nothing.

People who live in habitually dry areas may scoff at what we declare as drought but it is all relative. For many years, I have been cheerfully declaring that we get around 150 cm of rain a year (1500mm or about sixty inches) fairly evenly distributed across the year. We might complain about the dryness if we get several weeks without rain in summer but we are generally confident that the rains will arrive in time. Our prevailing westerly weather patterns tend to mean that we get moisture-laden air coming in from the ocean. High sunshine hours and relatively high rainfall is the norm. Currently, we are about 60% down on our normal rainfall in the first months of this year.

Fortunately, we source our water from our own, private bore so we are not in danger of running out. The water delivery businesses must be booming with urgent calls from those rural folk who rely on rain water tanks or surface water sources. Stream and river levels are uniformly low.

When it comes to gardening, because we live in a climate with consistent rainfall, we have no irrigation system and we can only reach a few, small areas with a hose. Extended dry periods are a good test for us. When the hydrangeas planted in shade start to wilt, we know we are very dry.

We are not unduly worried yet. The rains should come.  It is frustrating though, for people who garden every day. It feels as though much is on hold, waiting for rain. We can’t plant anything much or dig and divide. But at least Zach and I got onto a messy border immediately behind the house. There is a water tap close by so we could do more.

One might describe it as an historic but unremarkable border, most of the permanent trees and shrubs having been planted by Mark’s father, probably back in the 1950s and 1960s. Over the years, it has received little intensive care or love, confined to weeding, removing dead plants, a bit of pruning and filling bare spaces but little else. The swathe of auratum lilies were crying out for some love.

I haven’t counted the plant varieties but there must be at least 50 or 60 different ones in a curved area measuring up to three metres across and twenty five metres long. We pruned almost all the trees, shrubs, cycads and the like – a tidy-up really. The work came on the under plantings – the lower growing perennials and bulbs.

My mantra is that when there is a diverse top tier planting of trees and shrubs (like, one of each specimen), bottom tier plantings need to be simpler to give some cohesion. Our idea of simple may not be the same as many gardeners, let alone designers, but what Zach and I did was to consolidate the different ground level plantings into bigger blocks, rather than drifts or random placement. We removed some entirely (yellow tigridias and every last bit of green mondo grass), reduced some (it is very nice of Geranium madarense to seed down and naturalise but we only need four full-sized ones to make a statement next spring and a few younger ones for the year following – not 40), divided hostas and farfugiums and consolidated other plants into blocks.

All plants that were lifted were plunged into buckets of water, replanted into holes enriched with compost, thoroughly watered and mulched. If we don’t get enough rain in the next week or two, we can easily reach them with the hose.

Just a reminder not to lay mulch when the ground is bone dry. It will act as a barrier to moisture entering the soil. Mulch needs to be laid to protect existing moisture levels in the ground before it dries out.

May the autumn rains arrive soon.