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

Maps, satellites and the science of place From the ground, a garden can feel a bit like an island. A fence on every side, a gate, a boundary you mow up to and no further. You tend your patch, and the world beyond the hedge is somebody else's business. But if you see it from above, the way a swift sees it, or a satellite, or an ecologist bent over a screen, the fences dissolve. Your garden is no longer an island at all. It is one green cell in a vast, breathing tissue of garde