The first in a 12 part series on making your UK garden future-fit for climate change In a downstairs loo somewhere in East Sussex, there is a brick. Someone's grandmother put it there in the drought of 1976, and it has sat in the cold water of the cistern ever since, slowly shedding grit, quietly doing a little good. It is a fair emblem for how most of us think about saving water: a well-meant gesture, half-remembered, rarely examined, dusted off whenever the reservoirs drop

Author's note:- I became fascinated with dendritic chalk streams when I first moved to Sussex and learned of their uniqueness. This fictional creative piece allows he voice of cyril to talk about similar streams in Hampshire in the context of 'shifting baseline syndrome'. It is the first in a series of 12 essays on 'Shifting baselines' looking at different ecosystems and how they have become depleted in living memory. They are written in dialect where possible to acknowledge

"Save the bees" may be one of most successful conservation slogan of our age. It is on tote bags and T-shirts, in supermarket campaigns and children's books, and it has done a great deal of good in waking people up to the plight of pollinators. But it carries a rather awkward problem. The bee that most people picture when they hear it, the honeybee in its wooden hive, is largely doing fine. In some places it is doing a little too well. And the bees that genuinely need saving

What a friend taught me over a bowl of rice in Amsterdam, and what my agriculturally mechanised Essex childhood had already taken away. In the early 2000s I shared a kitchen in Amsterdam with my soul sister Alodia, who had come to the Netherlands from the Philippines, and who changed the way I understood food without even trying. She did it, mostly, by the way she handled rice. I noticed it first as a small thing. When she cooked, she was really careful with the rice. She mea