"No rain, no rainbow."

— Hawaiian proverb

It came on Thursday afternoon, and it came the way it always does here — all at once, sideways, and on a day I had washing out. Six weeks of it not raining, and then two hours where it did nothing else. I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched several hundred litres of it run off the shed roof, past the downpipe, and away down the path, because the second water butt was still in its packaging behind the mower. Where I put it in March. Where I told you all last week to make sure yours was not.

• Why the lawn I had written off has greened in eight days — and what rain carries that my watering can never did

• The mistake I nearly made on Friday morning, standing over soil that looked soaked and was dry two inches down

• What I noticed only once the watering stopped — and why it took the relief arriving to show me what I had been carrying

(5 min read)

Hello friends, Gary Stewart here.

I want to start by admitting the obvious thing.

Last week I sat down and wrote you three garden to-dos, and the very first one was to connect your second water butt now, before the rain comes, because when a dry spell breaks it tends to break hard and most of that water is off the roof and gone within the hour. I wrote that on the Saturday. I published it on the Friday after. And on the Thursday, when the sky over King's Lynn finally went that particular bruised colour it goes, I stood in the kitchen doorway with a mug of tea and watched a shed roof's worth of free water sheet off the felt, miss the downpipe entirely, and run away down the path toward the gate.

The butt was six feet away. Still boxed. Behind the mower.

There is no lesson in that, and I am not going to invent one. I simply thought you should hear it from me before you assumed the man writing the tips was carrying them out.

The sound I had stopped expecting

What I had forgotten, in six weeks of not hearing it, is how loud rain is on a shed roof.

It started as that thing where you are not sure — three or four fat drops in the dust, the sort that raise a little puff and then vanish, which we had a few times in July and which came to nothing. Then it committed. Within a minute it was properly hammering, and the guttering was overwhelmed, and the dry ground was doing what dry ground does, which is to refuse it at first — the water sitting on the surface in beads, running off toward the low corner by the compost bins, gathering in a puddle where I have never once seen a puddle.

And then the smell arrived.

You will know it. That green-brown, mineral, almost sweet smell that comes off dry ground in the first minutes of rain and never comes off wet ground at all. It has a name: petrichor. And the substance responsible has a name too — geosmin, which is produced by bacteria living in the soil and released into the air when raindrops strike a dry surface, throwing tiny particles upward. It is, in the most literal sense, the smell of soil that has been waiting. Our noses are extraordinarily sensitive to it; we can detect it at concentrations most instruments would struggle with. We are, apparently, built to notice when the drought breaks.

Olivia and Cody were out in it inside about ninety seconds, both barefoot, both entirely without permission. I let it happen. In May, Cody ran across that same lawn barefoot and stopped after three steps and looked back at me, because it was hard and sharp and wrong under his feet. On Thursday he ran the whole length of it and did not stop at all.

What rain carries that the hose does not

I have hosed, carried, and sprinkled that lawn's neighbours for six weeks. Two hours of rain undid the whole argument.

Eight days on, the grass has gone from pale rope-coloured stubble to a proper, uneven, patchy green — the darker green coming through first where the shade sits, the thin bits near the path still catching up. It is not a beautiful lawn. It has never been a beautiful lawn. But it is unmistakably alive, and it did that without a single decision from me.

There are reasons the recovery is so much faster than anything the tap achieved, and I find them worth knowing.

The first is that rain is soft. Our water here is hard — properly hard, the kind that furs a kettle in a fortnight — and it is treated, and it is slightly alkaline. Rainwater is none of those things. It is naturally soft and very slightly acidic, which is closer to what most plants actually want, and it carries none of the dissolved calcium and treatment chemicals that tap water brings with it every time.

The second is that rain carries nitrogen. Small amounts of atmospheric nitrogen are converted by lightning and dissolved into rainfall as nitrates — a form plants can take up directly. It is not a great deal, but it is free, it is evenly spread, and it arrives at the root zone in solution. This is the honest answer to a question I have been asked more than any other over the years: why does a lawn look better after rain than after an hour of my sprinkler? Because the sprinkler is delivering hard, chlorinated water to the surface, and the sky is delivering soft, faintly fertilised water to the whole garden at once, at the temperature the day decides.

The third reason is the one I keep sitting with. Brown grass was never dead grass. The crowns — the growing points, down at the base — were alive the entire time, holding on in exactly the way I told you they were, though I will admit that around week five I had privately stopped believing it. The lawn did not come back because of the rain. The lawn came back because it had been quietly staying alive underneath, and the rain simply gave it permission.

The mistake I nearly made on Friday

Here is the part I would have got wrong if I had not gone out and checked.

On Friday morning the beds looked soaked. Dark, glistening, unmistakably wet — the way soil looks in a photograph of a well-tended garden. And because I had been living in a drought for six weeks, my instinct was relief, and relief's instinct is to do something celebratory. I very nearly reached for the liquid feed.

Instead I pushed a trowel into the bed beside the dahlias and turned it over.

Wet for perhaps an inch and a half. Then a clear line, like the tide mark in a bath, and beneath it the same dry clay I had been failing to reach all August. Two hours of hard rain onto hydrophobic ground had run off far more than it had soaked in. It looked like recovery, from above. It was, at that depth, still a drought.

That is worth saying plainly, because I suspect a lot of us stopped watering entirely on Thursday afternoon. The visible signal changed long before the underlying condition did. The containers still needed doing on Friday. The newly planted perennials still needed doing. The rain was the beginning of the recovery, not the completion of it, and it took a second and a third shower over the weekend before that trowel came up dark the whole way down.

Nothing to carry

And now the thing I actually wanted to write about, which I did not notice until Saturday evening.

At about half past seven I found myself standing in the kitchen with no particular reason to go outside.

For six weeks, half past seven has been the watering. Two cans, the outside tap, the walk down to the containers and back, the walk down to the sunflower and back, forty-odd minutes of it, every evening, in a t-shirt I had been wearing since breakfast. It was not hard work. It was simply there, every single day, sitting between me and the end of the day, and I had stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing a stone in your shoe if you walk far enough.

On Saturday there was nothing to carry. And what I felt was not straightforwardly relief. It was closer to the feeling of putting down a heavy bag and discovering that your arm has been aching for longer than you realised — that the ache did not begin when you put the bag down, it just became audible.

I have written to you before, more than once, about how tired August makes me. I understood that in a vague, seasonal way. What I did not understand until the watering stopped was how much of that tiredness was not the gardening at all — it was the daily obligation of holding something alive by hand, and the low continuous hum of knowing that if I skipped an evening, something on my list would die of it.

The rain took that off me. Not by improving my discipline, or my planning, or my character. It simply arrived, from somewhere entirely outside my arrangements, and did in two hours what six weeks of my carrying could not, and asked nothing of me in return.

I think we are quite bad, most of us, at accepting that kind of rescue. There is a part of me that wanted to feel sheepish about it — as though the garden recovering without my intervention were somehow a comment on my usefulness. But the garden has never needed me the way I have needed it. My job in a drought was smaller than I was treating it, and my job now is smaller still: keep an eye on the depth, mulch what I can, and let the weather do the work it is far better at than I am.

Cody's sunflower opened on Sunday. It is not the tallest sunflower in Norfolk. It leans notably to the left, and the rain has knocked it about a bit, and it will want tying to a cane before the next lot comes through midweek. He watered it every day of the drought with a jam jar, one plant, the whole of what he could carry, and it opened anyway.

I do not think it opened because of the jam jar. I think it would probably have managed without him.

But I would not want to be the one to tell him that, and I am not sure it matters. He gave the whole of what he had to the one thing he had chosen, and then the sky did the rest, and both of those things are true at once. That seems to me about as good a description of how anything gets grown as I am likely to arrive at.

The forecast has more coming Wednesday and Thursday. The butt is connected now — Saturday morning, twenty minutes, a hacksaw and a rainwater diverter, and I have no explanation for why it took me five months other than that it did.

We are not out of it yet. The reservoirs and the aquifers work on a longer clock than my lawn does, and one good week in August does not undo a summer. But the grass is green, the beds are dark the whole way down, and for the first evening since June I sat on the step with nothing in my hands at all.

Gardening Tips

1. Check the depth before you believe the surface. Rain onto badly dried soil runs off far more than it soaks in. Push a trowel in and turn it over: if there is a clear line an inch or two down with dry ground beneath it, keep watering your priority plants as though the rain had not happened. Containers especially — a pot under a leafy plant can stay bone dry through a downpour, because the foliage acts as an umbrella. The Lesson: Relief arriving is not the same as the difficulty being over. Look underneath before you stand down.

2. Wait a few days before you feed. Every instinct says to reward the recovery immediately. Give it a week. A plant that has been rationing water for six weeks needs to rehydrate and get its roots working again before it can do anything useful with nutrients, and feed applied to ground that is only surface-wet still risks concentrating where you do not want it. Let the rain settle in, then feed lightly. The Lesson: Something that has just come through a hard season needs rest before it needs asking.

3. Mulch now, while the ground is wet. This is the single most valuable window of the whole month. A two- to three-inch layer of compost, bark, or grass clippings laid over damp soil locks that moisture in place. You are not adding anything — you are keeping what arrived for free. Do it before the ground dries again, because mulching dry soil seals the dryness in just as effectively. The Lesson: The work you do just after the relief is what decides whether the relief lasts.

Garden To-Do’s

1. Connect the water butt. Genuinely, this time. More rain is forecast midweek. A diverter and twenty minutes with a hacksaw is all it takes, and one decent downpour on an average shed roof will fill a butt you can still be drawing on in September. I have no standing to lecture anyone here. I am simply saying it works, now that I have done it.

2. Leave the lawn alone for another fortnight — then feed it properly. Let it green up fully and put on real growth before you do anything to it. Mow high when you do mow, taking no more than a third off. Once it is growing strongly, an autumn lawn feed — low nitrogen, high potash — strengthens the roots for winter rather than forcing soft top growth. Early September is also the moment for scarifying and aerating, which the ground is finally soft enough to allow.

3. Sow now, while the moisture is here. The window that drought closed has reopened. Spring cabbage, winter lettuce, spinach, oriental greens, and hardy salad leaves can all go in over the next fortnight and will germinate readily in warm, damp soil. And watch for slugs — they have been dormant and hungry for six weeks, and they will find your seedlings before you do.

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Relief Reveals the Weight. You will not know what the daily obligation was costing you until the day it lifts. That sudden tiredness on the other side is not a new problem — it is the old one, finally becoming audible. Let it be felt rather than explained away.

Not Everything Is Yours to Arrange. The rain was not earned, planned, or deserved by anyone. It came from entirely outside my capability and did in two hours what six weeks of carrying could not. Some of what saves a season arrives without your involvement, and accepting that gracefully is its own small skill.

The Ground Remembers. Here is what the drought quietly gave us: roots that went deeper than they would ever have bothered to go in a wet year, searching for water that was not near the surface. That structure does not disappear now the rain has come. The garden that comes through a dry summer is anchored more firmly than the one that never had to look. What was hard is still down there, holding on, in the form of something stronger.

Gary Stewart tries to write every week about what the garden teaches, slowly. If this one landed, pass it on to someone who has been watching the sky since June.

Until next time Embrace Gardening 🌱