I spent several years living and working in the Netherlands and this m On the sandy heaths of the Veluwe, the largest stretch of lowland heath in the Netherlands, you can watch a landscape lose its colour. The purple of the heather is giving way, year on year, to the flat green of a few vigorous grasses and the dark sprawl of bramble and young birch. Nothing has been planted here and nothing sprayed. The heath is being fed to death, by a gas you cannot see. That gas is ammonia, and the story...

Droughtproofing a suburban garden, part two of twelve. One statistic turns up again and again in gardening books, seed catalogues and regenerative-farming talks: every 1 percent increase in soil organic matter lets an acre of soil hold roughly 20,000 gallons more water. It is a compelling number, and it is repeated with great confidence. It is also, soil scientists have concluded, largely wrong. That matters for anyone trying to droughtproof a garden, because building up the soil is the right...

A coppice wood in the Weald of Kent Mind that low branch as you come in, and give your eyes a minute to settle, for it is dark under here after the lane. There. Now you are in the wood proper. Sit you down on that stool, the old cut stump there, that is a hazel been cut and come again for three hundred year very like, and I will tell you what this wood was, for you have caught me at the right time of year to feel the want of it. It is May. And on a May evening this wood should be near enough...