The River is Drying Up and I'm Taking Notes

I'm writing this from the Pyrenees, where Plum has just done her morning belly flop into the river and I've left my flip flops a little lower down the beach at Lac de Montbel than yesterday. The lake is drying up, the river at the bottom of my garden is drying up, and I'm recording it’s disappearance.

Every morning, before the canicule hits in full force, I walk down to check the level and every evening I do the same. Lac de Montbel, a few kilometres from my home, is a reservoir used for fighting wildfires and irrigating agriculture across the region and its level drops visibly every single day. I've started leaving my flip flops a little further down the beach each time I swim there, a small, daily note of something slowly disappearing.

The river that runs along the edge of my garden is lower than I have ever seen it. Where a river and a stream met under the red bridge near the petanque club, the stream is only a dry stone bed, usually running much further into the summer, if only a trickle, and the water in the river moves differently now as it is much slower and lower. It still dances and plays, but there is less of it to dance with.

The whole village is conserving water and nobody is pouring anything down the sink. I've been doing this for years, everything goes back to the garden, although now my neighbours are doing it too, stopping me in the street, worried and watching the sky. There is a particular kind of fear that comes with watching a water source disappear –-it’s pretty foreboding

Meanwhile in my garden I'm doing what I can, keeping large areas wild, leaving water out for the hedgehogs and building a winding path from old wood piles. I counted six hedgehogs last night, moving through the garden in the dark. I'm also planning a wildflower garden with nothing bought in and nothing grown in a monoculture somewhere else, collecting seeds and joining forces with friends to share seeds and plants. The dogs have taken to lying in the shallowest part of the river in the afternoons, where it is still cool and still moving. My friend introduced me to a book called We are the Ark by Mary Reynolds and in between long working hours, reading it is reinforcing what I do and giving me joy and inspiration.

What strikes me most is how quickly nature moves into every space we leave it, even in this heat such as the bindweed… just doing its thing. I spend part of each morning unwinding it from things it shouldn't be strangling, and yet it's always the first to throw a green cover over my piles of old wood and branches - pioneer work that holds the bare ground together, brings minerals up from deep in the soil and feeds the bees while it waits for something more permanent to arrive. It is impossible to entirely resent something that works this hard. Nature acts quickly – it’s just us who are slowing it down.

I'm doing all of this while organising the River Summit and Festival, which takes place on 4th and 5th September in Henley-on-Thames, and my environment just reinforces the importance of the work we do every day. What I watch happening here every morning and every evening by this river is a version of what is happening to waterways across the UK and although the scale is different, the causes are different, but the feeling of watching something precious diminish day by day is exactly the same.

The people gathering in Henley in September are the ones who notice that and who refuse to look away, and I hope you'll be one of them.