When the Ground Runs Dry

We were too slow on climate change and may now be in a phase of being able to stop that acceleration of climate change, and its felt very much to me that we're now moving from a phase of prevention to coping. Now the fires have arrived, even in Sussex. So what can our back garden actually do?

There is a particular grief in watching something you were warned about arrive on schedule. For thirty years the science was clear, the graphs pointed one way, and collectively we did not move fast enough. Now the consequences are no longer a projection in a report; they are smoke on the horizon in July. The uncomfortable truth is that we have slipped from a decade of preventing into a decade of coping. The question is no longer only "how do we stop this?" but "how do we live alongside what we failed to stop?" And, perhaps, more hopefully, "what can we, at the scale of a single garden, actually do about it?"

This article is about that second question. But to answer it honestly, we have to start with the first.

The heat–fire link is real, and it is measurable

The relationship between rising temperatures and wildfire is not a hunch. It is one of the better-established findings in climate science. There is no simple ''switch''; heat alone does not light a fire, and ignition still depends on a spark, whether from lightning or, far more often, from us. But the conditions for fire track temperature almost everywhere researchers have looked.

A landmark 2020 review by Jones and colleagues examined 57 separate studies and found they all pointed the same way: human-caused warming has already increased the frequency and severity of fire weather worldwide. NASA, analysing 21 years of satellite data, found that the most extreme wildfires on Earth have become more frequent, more intense, and larger, with warmer nights now allowing fires to keep burning through the hours that once gave firefighters a reprieve. In the western United States, one much-cited study concluded that climate change roughly doubled the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015. Fire seasons there now run about a month longer than they did thirty-five years ago.

The most sobering figure is a simple ratio: in some western US forests, modelling suggests that a single degree Celsius of average warming could increase the area burned each year by as much as 600 per cent. Fire responds to heat not gently and linearly, but steeply.

Britain is no longer exempt

It is tempting to file all of this under "somewhere hotter and further away." That comfort ended in the summer of 2022.

During that year's record-breaking heatwaves, fire services in England attended at least 24,316 fires between June and August compared with 6,213 in the same period the year before. On 19 July alone, the hottest day the UK had ever recorded, there were around 800 fires, and the London Fire Brigade had its busiest day since the Second World War, declaring a major incident. In the first week of that August, London recorded 340 grass, rubbish and open-land fires against just 42 in the same week a year earlier; an eightfold jump.

In 2025 the Met Office put a number on the cause. Its attribution study found that the severe UK fires of 2022 were made at least six times more likely by human-driven climate change. As the study's lead author put it, wildfires are now an emerging threat to Britain, not a foreign one.

And here is the detail that should matter most to anyone reading a gardening site: research into London's 2022 fires found they broke out primarily in urban grass and scrub, green spaces, parks AND domestic gardens.

The dry lawn is now a fuel.

The native-species question, and an honest answer

You may have heard that native plants "burn less easily" than introduced ones. It's a comforting idea, and there is something in it, but the science asks us to be careful.

The blunt version doesn't hold up. Reviews comparing native and non-native vegetation have found that native species can be just as flammable, and occasionally more so, than introduced ones. Fire-adapted native habitats; think heath, gorse, or the fynbos of South Africa, can be highly flammable precisely because they evolved with fire. A plant's passport is not, on its own, a measure of how readily it burns.

The truer and better-evidenced pattern is this: it is invasive, non-native monocultures, not native diversity, that tend to make whole landscapes burn more. They do it less by being individually more combustible and more by changing the system - spreading fast, drying to straw, and knitting the ground into a continuous carpet of dead fuel. The classic culprit is invasive grass: it colonises bare or disturbed ground, dies back into tinder, carries flame quickly and low, and regrows fastest after a burn, locking a place into a self-perpetuating fire cycle. On Catalina Island off California, roughly a third of the land is now covered in invasive flammable grass, and researchers there find that native-dominated ground with its deeper roots and higher moisture retention is measurably more fire-resistant than the invaded ground beside it.

So the useful principle for a garden isn't "natives good, exotics bad." It's this: fire feeds on dry, dead, continuous fuel, and it is starved by living, moist, diverse, broken-up planting. That distinction is one a gardener can actually act on.

What a back garden can do

Here is where despair can turn back into agency. Britain's gardens cover a genuinely enormous area, collectively far larger than all our national nature reserves combined. What we each do on our own patch adds up to a landscape. And, conveniently, almost everything that makes a garden more fire-resilient is the same thing that makes it more alive.

A rewilded garden is a wetter garden. Soil rich in organic matter holds far more water, staying damp and cool through a dry spell instead of baking to dust. Living, green, deep-rooted plants carry moisture in their tissues; a mown lawn left to brown is, functionally, a sheet of kindling. Structural variety; layers of shrub and tree, shaded ground, a pond, a boggy corner breaks up the continuous dry fuel that fire needs to run, and keeps the air beneath cooler. Every one of those moves is also a move toward biodiversity, carbon in the soil, and a garden that shrugs off a heatwave.

Practically, that means: build organic matter so your soil holds water rather than shedding it. Keep living ground cover instead of bare earth or brittle stubble. Let go of the parched, chemical, close-cropped lawn in favour of deeper-rooted, more drought-tolerant planting that stays green. Add water, a pond, a rain garden, a damp hollow, as a cool, moist anchor. Clear the genuinely dangerous dead fuel: dry leaf litter heaped against a timber fence or shed, brittle debris under decking. And be wary of the fast-spreading invasive grasses and scrub that turn to tinder; a diverse, layered planting is your ally, a dried-out monoculture your liability.

None of this makes a single garden fireproof, and a British back garden will not face a Californian megafire. But that isn't the point. The point is that a network of green, water-holding, living gardens is cooler, wetter, and far less ready to ignite than a suburb of paved yards, plastic grass and parched lawns and cumulatively, across a street, a town, a country, that is a real change in the landscape's temperature and its capacity to burn.

We did not stop the warming in time. That grief is honest, and it deserves to be felt. But it is not the end of the story. The same soil that holds carbon holds water; the same wildness that shelters life also refuses to burn. We can make our own patch of ground cooler, damper, and greener.

References

• Jones, M. W. et al. (2020), review of climate change and fire weather — via ScienceDirect. Human-induced warming has increased the frequency and severity of fire weather globally.

• NASA Science, Wildfires and Climate Change — 21-year satellite analysis; extreme wildfires becoming more frequent, intense and larger; warmer nights extend fire activity. science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/wildfires-and-climate-change

• NOAA, Wildfire Climate Connection — climate change roughly doubled the number of large western US fires, 1984–2015. noaa.gov/noaa-wildfire/wildfire-climate-connection

• US Geological Survey, Will global warming produce more frequent and more intense wildfires? — strong correlations between warm summers and large fire years; ignition as the variable. usgs.gov

• Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), Wildfires and Climate Change — fire seasons ~a month longer than 35 years ago; up to 600% increase in burned area per 1°C in some western forests. c2es.org/content/wildfires-and-climate-change

• Met Office (2025), Climate change made severe UK fires in 2022 six times more likely — attribution study, lead author Dr Chantelle Burton. metoffice.gov.uk

• Red Cross, Wildfires UK: causes, risks and why they're increasing — 24,316 fires in England, June–Aug 2022 vs 6,213 in 2021; ~800 fires on 19 July 2022. redcross.org.uk

• London Fire Brigade (Aug 2022) — 340 grass, rubbish and open-land fires in the first week of August vs 42 the previous year. london-fire.gov.uk

• Heatwaves and Firewaves: The Drivers of Urban Wildfires in London in the Summer of 2022, Fire Technology (2025) — London's 2022 fires occurred primarily in urban grass, green spaces, parks and domestic gardens. link.springer.com

• Flammability features of native and non-native woody species from the southernmost ecosystems: a review, Fire Ecology (2024) — native species can be as flammable, or more so, than non-natives; the "natives less flammable" hypothesis is not supported as a blanket rule. fireecology.springeropen.com

• Catalina Island Conservancy (2026), How Native Plants Help Protect Catalina from Wildfire — native-dominated ground more fire-resistant; ~35% of the island now invasive flammable grass driving a fire cycle. catalinaconservancy.org

• Msweli et al. / Cape Floristic Region flammability studies — flammability highest in invasive alien plants; fuel moisture, load and continuity as key drivers. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov