The 5 top ways to save water in a drought

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 and the hosepipe bans start while our pipes leak more and more daily thanks to corrupt water companies.

This summer they have been threatened again. As I write, more than half of England has been declared in drought, with seven regions affected and nine water companies operating hosepipe bans. England had just seven per cent of its average July rainfall, and the south of the country saw closer to one per cent. The Environment Agency's director of water, Helen Wakeham, has called it a second consecutive summer drought and an exceptionally serious situation. Last year gave us the driest spring in 132 years and the hottest summer on record, and some regions were still recovering from it in January. This is no longer a freak event we ride out and forget. It is the shape of the British summer we are moving into, and a garden and a home that can meet it calmly are worth building.

So this is a practical piece about drought-proofing the ordinary home and garden: the planting, the water butts, the greywater, and yes, the brick in the loo. It is also, in keeping with everything else on this site, an honest one. Some of the folk wisdom works. Some of it quietly backfires. And the single most useful truth is one the marketing rarely leads with: the most drought-proof garden is not the one you water cleverly, but the one that barely asks to be watered at all.

Where the water actually goes

Lets start with a number (that most of us get wildly wrong): The average person in England uses around 140 litres of water a day. A family of four, then, moves something like 450 to 500 litres through the house every day, most of it without a second thought. When Water UK polled people on this, the majority guessed their whole household used less than a fifth of that. We are, collectively, almost blind to our own consumption.

Inside the house, two things dominate: toilets and showers account for more than half of all domestic use. The garden, for all the attention a hosepipe ban brings, is a smaller and more seasonal slice. A running sprinkler gets through roughly a thousand litres an hour, more than a family uses indoors in a day, so switching it off in a dry spell is a real saving. But the steady background waste inside the house is where the largest, least glamorous gains live, and a leaking loo is the worst offender: a silently running toilet can lose between 215 and 400 litres a day, more than an entire household uses, and you may never hear it.

The brick in the loo, honestly

Which brings us back to the cistern. The instinct behind the brick is sound. An older toilet designed to flush on nine or thirteen litres is using far more than it needs to, and displacing some of that water means every flush uses less. The problem is the brick itself. Ordinary house bricks crumble in standing water over time, and the grit they shed can work into the flush valve and cause the very leaks that waste hundreds of litres a day. Reduce the volume too far and the pan does not clear on one flush, so people flush twice and use more water than they started with.

The fix is the same idea done properly. A cistern displacement device, a Save-a-Flush bag or a Hippo, is shaped to sit safely clear of the mechanism and is often sent out free by your water company for the asking. A Save-a-Flush saves around a litre a flush, a Hippo around three, and across a household's year that adds up without any of the brick's mischief. Two honest caveats, though. These devices are made for larger cisterns of roughly nine litres and up. If you already have a modern dual-flush toilet, it is doing this job by design and needs no help. And if you are replacing an old suite anyway, a modern dual-flush is the real upgrade. The brick, in other words, was answering a real question with the wrong object. Answer it with the right one, or with a new toilet, and move on.

While you are in there: fix dripping taps, check the cistern for the silent leak, and if you are on an unmetered supply, look into a meter. Metered households tend to use noticeably less, partly because a bill that responds to your habits is a quiet daily nudge to notice them.

A garden that drinks less

Now the garden, and here the honest headline is liberating rather than restricting. An established garden barely needs watering, even in a dry summer. The RHS is blunt about it: established trees, shrubs and herbaceous perennials in beds and borders only need water in extreme drought, and then only the individuals showing real stress - in my garden this has only been a cherry tree. Almost all garden watering goes on plants that could manage without it, or on making the wrong plants survive in the wrong place.

The first move is not water at all. It is mulch. A layer of organic matter at least five centimetres thick, laid over the soil in the cooler months, can cut water loss from the surface by as much as three quarters. Bare soil evaporates its moisture straight into the air; covered soil holds it for the roots. This is the same principle explored in the piece on soil and its capacity to hold water, and it is the single highest-return thing most of us can do. Feed the soil with organic matter over the years and it behaves like a sponge, releasing water slowly through the dry weeks.

The second move is to choose plants that want the conditions you have. The RHS ran a round of interviews with garden staff across its own gardens, the National Trust and private nurseries, asking simply which plants shrug off a wet winter and a dry summer with little or no watering. The list is long and lovely: lavender and rosemary, sea holly and euphorbia, verbena, catmint, achillea, many of the grasses. As their water reduction officer Janet Manning puts it, the aim is to train your plants to be drought athletes. That means watering a new planting well for its first summer or two so the roots go deep, then easing off so those roots learn to hunt for moisture rather than lounging near a wet surface. Large trees may need supporting for two or three years; after that, they should be on their own.

When you do water, water like rain, not like a mist. Less often but far more thoroughly, enough to wet the soil to a depth of fifteen centimetres, then let the surface dry before you go again. A daily splash trains roots to stay shallow and thirsty. A proper soak once or twice a week does the opposite. Water in the cool of early morning or evening so less is lost to evaporation.

And let the lawn go brown. This is the hardest one for many of us to accept, and the easiest to act on, because it means doing nothing. A brown summer lawn is not a dead lawn. The grass has simply gone dormant, and it will green up within a week or two once the rain returns. Pouring drinking water onto a lawn to keep it a colour is close to the least useful thing a garden hose can do in a drought.

Catching what falls, and using what you have

Then there is the water that arrives free from the sky and the water you have already paid for once. A water butt on a downpipe stores winter and shower rain for the dry weeks, and a single roof sheds a surprising volume in even a modest downpour. In a summer of hosepipe bans, that butt is often the only tap your garden is allowed. Watering cans and buckets stay permitted under a ban, so a butt plus a can keeps the pots and the newly planted going when the hose is off.

Greywater, the water from washing-up bowls, baths and showers, can go onto the garden too, with a few honest limits. The RHS is happy for you to use cooled washing-up water on ornamental plants. Keep it off anything you plan to eat, use it fresh rather than storing it where it turns stagnant, and go gently with soapy or softened water rather than drenching the same patch daily. It is a useful supplement in a pinch, not a permanent irrigation system, and treating it as the former keeps it safe.

Finally, look at your hard surfaces, because drought and flood are two faces of the same broken water cycle. A garden paved over for parking sheds its rain straight into the drains, giving the soil nothing to store and the sewers everything to cope with at once. Permeable surfaces, gravel, permeable paving, stepping stones set in planting, let the rain soak in where it lands. A shallow rain garden, a planted dip that catches roof and path run-off, holds a downpour and feeds it slowly to the ground. This is the connective, corridor-minded thinking the piece on ten ways to rewild a garden returns to again and again: a garden that holds water is a garden that helps in both the flood and the drought.

An honest reckoning on scale

Here is the part the water-saving leaflets tend to skip. Your household is a small share of the national picture. The water companies themselves lose around three billion litres a day to leaks across England and Wales, close to a fifth of everything they put into supply, and agriculture and industry draw far more than domestic taps do. A single home saving a few litres a flush will not end a drought, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Two things are true at once. The biggest levers are structural: fixing the leaks, building the storage the country has under-invested in for decades, and getting average use down toward the 110 litres per person the Environment Act sets as a 2050 target. Those are jobs for water companies, regulators and government, and it is fair to hold them to it rather than quietly carrying the guilt yourself. But the domestic side is not nothing. Millions of small savings are how demand actually falls, dry summer by dry summer, and a garden built to hold water is part of the solution rather than part of the strain. The RHS makes the point that green space does real work in the water cycle, holding rainfall in a downpour and cooling the air in a heatwave as soils and leaves release their moisture. Your patch, mulched and planted well, gives back more than it takes.

Do your part without imagining it is the whole part, and lean on those with the bigger levers to do theirs.

The same lesson for organisations

There is a version of all this for anyone who runs a team or a business, and the ecology here is exact rather than metaphorical. A drought-proof garden works because it holds a buffer: soil that stores water, deep roots, a butt full against the dry weeks. It is not run at the very edge of its supply. Organisations with no slack, no reserves, every person and pound committed to the moment, are the paved-over garden: fine until the rain stops, then suddenly with nothing to draw on. The Organisation as Ecosystem strand takes this further, but the shape is simple: systems survive shocks on what they banked in the good times.

When the rain comes back

The brick is still in that downstairs cistern in East Sussex, and it can come out now, replaced by a device that does the job without the grit. But the real work is quieter and greener than any object in a tank. It is the mulch laid down in February, the lavender that never asks for the hose, the butt filling on the downpipe, the lawn allowed to fade and trusted to return. None of it is dramatic. All of it compounds.

We did not do enough, soon enough, about the climate that is drying our summers, and there is no honest way around that. But the response in our own homes and gardens need not be anxious or heroic. Prepare the soil. Choose the plants that want to be here. Catch the rain, use it wisely, and let the grass go gold without guilt. Then, when the rain does come back, and it will, you will have built something that drinks it in slowly and keeps a little for the dry days ahead.

Written by Helena Jevons, AKA The Urban Wildling. Helena spent the first 10 years of her career in 'big food' way before 'ultra processed' food was recognised as the issue it is now, and realised the way we create our food and nurture our land, wildlife and crops needed to change. She is a cultural geographer by training and her dissertation was on 'The cultural, ecological and economic impacts of the common agricultural policy of set aside'.

References and further reading

• Environment Agency and National Drought Group (2026). Drought status updates and hosepipe ban announcements, England. GOV.UK.

• Met Office (2026). Monthly and seasonal rainfall summaries, England.

• Water UK and Waterwise (2025). Water's Worth Saving campaign and household water use research.

• Water UK (2025). Water You Thinking? research on public perception of water use.

• Royal Horticultural Society. Drought-Resistant Gardening; Watering Plants Wisely; Sustainable Water Use / Water Neutral Gardening; Choose Plants for Seasonally Wet and Dry Soils; Drought-Resistant Plants. rhs.org.uk.

• Royal Horticultural Society (2026). Emergency water-management measures across RHS gardens, reported via PA.

• Energy Saving guidance on Cistern Displacement Devices (Save-a-Flush, Hippo) and their suitable cistern sizes.

• DEFRA / Environment Act 2021: target to reduce average consumption to 110 litres per person per day by 2050.

• DiscoverWater / Water UK: leakage figures for England and Wales.