How to Drought-Proof Your Land and Reduce Wildfire Risk

Drought-Proofing Your land: Why Water Storage Beats Watering

I'm writing this in mid-August 2026. Parts of the UK haven't had meaningful rain in over 50 days. Lawns are straw. Hedgerows look like it's October, not August. And yet six months ago we were wading through one of the wettest winters and springs on record. It rained, properly rained, most days for months.

That contradiction is the whole story. We don't have a water problem in this country. We have a water storage problem.

The land remembers

If you want to understand this summer's wildfires, don't start with the weather. Start with what's been done to the land over the last few hundred years.

Take a map of where the wildfires have been burning in the north of England this year, and lay it over a map of the moorland that's been drained for grouse shooting. They match. Not roughly — closely. Look towards continental Europe and you'll see the same pattern in a different guise: the worst fires are concentrated in commercial forestry plantations, not in biodiverse, structurally messy woodland. Monocultures burn. Diverse, wet, complicated land doesn't burn nearly as easily.

None of this is new damage. It's old damage, showing up now at landscape scale. Generations of land management decisions — drain it, simplify it, dry it out, make it productive — are coming home to roost.

Why we're drier than we should be

Here's the part that gets missed: we've disconnected ourselves from the water cycle. Rain that lands on our roofs and gardens gets funnelled into a downpipe, into a drain, into a sewer, into a river, into the sea, as fast as engineering can manage it. We've built an entire infrastructure whose only job is to get water off the land and away from us as quickly as possible.

That's the opposite of what we need right now. We need to slow water down — not just so it puddles on the surface, but so it has time to soak in, recharge the soil, and refill the aquifers underneath us. Every garden, every rewilded paddock, every scrap of land that water passes over has a part to play in that.

There's a name for this in the sustainable drainage world: source control. It's one of the core principles in the CIRIA SuDS Manual — keep water on your land for as long as possible before you let it go anywhere else. It's never mattered more than it does right now.

Slow the flow

A community group in the north of England coined a phrase for this a few years back: Slow the Flow. It's a good one to borrow, because it's exactly the right instruction for a garden of any size.

Start small. Disconnect your downpipe from the drain and send it into a bed, a lawn, the soil — anywhere that isn't a pipe heading straight to the sewer. Next time you're out on a dog walk, look at the drainage ditches running alongside the footpaths. Now imagine them blocked, or at least slowed with a few well-placed obstructions, instead of doing their job of shipping water off the land as efficiently as possible.

And stop treating the boggy corner of your garden or field as a problem to be fixed. It isn't. It's the landscape telling you exactly where the water wants to be. Lean into it, don't drain it.

For bigger land: paddocks, fields, whole sites

If you've got more than a domestic garden to work with, there's more you can do.

Let unproductive fields flood. If your land has been simplified over generations — flattened, drained, tidied into uniform grass — now is the moment to reintroduce some chaos. Dig scrapes so water has somewhere to sit and soak in over days rather than minutes. Put in a pond, even a small one; it's standard ecological advice for a reason, and the impact is always bigger than the size of the pond suggests.

If you're managing meadows or rough grassland, think about taking an early cut to remove dry biomass — it's one less thing to burn later in the season. And depending on the scale of your land, fire breaks or gravel strips are worth considering too, though they're a smaller part of the picture than water is.

Worth saying clearly: some ecosystems are meant to burn periodically — heathland is a good example. This isn't an argument that all fire is unnatural or that it can all be engineered away. It's an argument that, right now, too much of our land has lost its capacity to hold water, and that's what's turning ordinary dry spells into wildfire risk.

Rewilding isn't the villain here

There's been a lot of noise this summer blaming rewilding for the fires. It doesn't hold up. Look at where the fires have actually been — drained grouse moor, commercial monoculture, tightly mown amenity grassland with nothing else going on. Not rewilded land. Not land with large herbivores moving through it, grazing, trampling, dunging, doing the job they've always done of breaking up fuel before it can build into a problem. If your land is big enough to support grazing animals, permanently or seasonally, that's one of the oldest and most effective tools there is.

It starts with the soil

Every part of this comes back to soil. Organic matter is what gives soil its capacity to hold water in the first place, and the effect is significant: Rothamsted Research has calculated that every 1% increase in soil organic carbon adds roughly 354,000 litres of water-holding capacity per hectare, to a depth of 30cm. Our soils, on the whole, are impoverished — organic matter levels are low across most of the UK's farmed and gardened land. Rebuilding that isn't a quick fix. It's a five, ten, twenty-year project, and the case for starting now rather than later gets stronger every summer.

The end of the conventional lawn

I'll say something that won't be popular with everyone: the era of the conventional lawn is over. Feeding it, watering it, spraying it, mowing it into a uniform green carpet — properly maintaining a lawn like that, especially in the South East, is hard to defend right now.

The alternative isn't a dead garden. It's a meadow, or for many gardens, something more practical: a clover or legume lawn, mixing in white clover, red clover, black medic, plantain. It stays green considerably longer into a drought than turf grass does. I won't oversell it — in a genuine four or five month drought, even a clover lawn will go brown and wait for rain like everything else. But it buys you weeks, sometimes months, that ordinary turf simply doesn't have.

Reading your plants

If your trees and shrubs are dropping leaves early this year, that's not necessarily them dying. In a lot of cases it's early senescence — a deliberate, natural response to drought stress, shedding leaves to cut water loss before real damage sets in. Worth knowing before you assume the worst.

Planting for the next fifty years

Native planting is still the best choice for wildlife, full stop. But it's worth finding a midground now: bringing in near-native and non-native species alongside the natives, specifically for their drought and heat tolerance. We're not planning for next year. We're planning for the next 50, and realistically we should have started 50 years ago. As the old line goes, the best time to plant a tree was 50 years ago — the next best time is now.

One more nuance worth having: deadwood matters. Birds need perches, territory, nesting sites, and a proportion of standing and fallen deadwood in any landscape is genuinely valuable. But whole stands of dead trees en masse isn't the same thing, and isn't the goal.

Structural diversity beats monoculture, every time

If you take one thing from all of this: look at your land. If it's a monoculture — tight amenity grass, no scrub, no trees, no bramble, no hedging — it is simply more exposed to wildfire risk than land with a mosaic of habitats layered into it. That's not opinion, it's what the fire maps show, again and again, this summer and every summer like it.

Where we come in

This is exactly why a proper site survey matters before any design work starts. At Teasels, that means a full topographical survey and a landscape-scale survey, looking at how your site's water fits into the wider catchment around it — not just what's happening inside your boundary. Our preliminary ecological assessment goes further back than the plants currently growing on site: we look at how the land was used 50, 100 years ago, because that history is usually still shaping how water moves across it today. That "poorly drained" corner your garden has always had a problem with? Once you understand the site properly, it usually turns out to be an asset, not a fault. You can read more about how we approach this on our design process page.

I'm an optimist

I think 2026 could be the tipping point. I hope it changes government policy — makes it easier to build reservoirs, easier to dig a pond in a paddock, easier to do the obvious, sensible thing with water instead of fighting bureaucracy to do it. I think we're heading, slowly, towards valuing structural diversity over monoculture, because the alternative keeps burning.

No water, no life. It's one of those lines that sounds obvious until you say it out loud, and then it sits with you.

The rain will return. It always does — we said the same thing in January, convinced it would never stop, and by August it had. The question isn't whether the drought ends. It's whether we've done the work to hold onto the water when it does.

Are you ready to hold it?



Quick tips

• See water as a resource, not a nuisance
• Disconnect your downpipe — send it into a bed, lawn or the soil, not the drain
• Install a pond, however small
• Stop treating the wet corner of your garden or field as a problem
• Get a topographical, landscape-scale site survey done
• Get a soil survey — know your soil type and organic matter percentage
• Convert lawn to meadow, or to a clover/legume mix
• Dig scrapes in paddocks or fields to hold water longer
• Take an early cut on meadows to remove dry biomass fuel
• Build soil organic matter — every 1% adds roughly 354,000 litres of water-holding capacity per hectare
• Prepare now. The rain always comes back.

Sources referenced in this draft

• CIRIA SuDS Manual — resource hub via susdrain.org
• Rothamsted Research soil organic carbon / water-holding capacity figure, via NFU