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

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

Why the river you think is healthy and the garden you think is wild are both haunted by an abundance you never experienced, and what shifting baseline syndrome means for anyone trying to bring nature back. Stand on a bridge over a lowland river on a bright morning. The water runs more or less clear. A moorhen picks along the margin, willows lean over the bank, a couple of mallard drift past. It looks, by any ordinary reckoning, like a healthy river. A nice river. The kind of