Summer: the very sweet and the slightly bitter in the garden

One of the great joys of living in the Monferrato region of Piedmont is that the rich soil and copious amounts of sun can give lavish life to a garden. What is difficult however, is that by mid-summer many plants are going past their best and it becomes increasingly challenging to keep a fledgling garden alive as we battle the relentless and unforgivingly fierce heat.   Even though I’ve designed a lot of the garden at Villa Menaluna to be drought-tolerant and Mediterranean in feel, our first full year for the plants has been a challenge, with collected rainwater in our ‘pozzo’ (underground well) barely able to keep up with the watering demands of the sultry summer months.

This is compounded by the change in the local climate which has got hotter and drier certainly in our years of living here, but we also hear the same from long-established neighbours and farmers.  We’re regularly told that in years past it was not uncommon to have at least one big storm every month through the summer which would be more than enough to balance the heat and rain, especially for the growing vines and dormant truffles - both of which need sufficient water to fully develop when their time comes.   

Here now in 2023, the vineyards have again been struggling with the incessant heat. With the threat of water shortages and drought again this year, we all do our bit to conserve water: bowls are kept in sinks to catch any overflow from daily use, tumble dryers have their water tanks emptied onto thirsty herb gardens and a variety of bowls and buckets placed at the ready to capture anything that falls from the skies.

Now, at almost the end of August, the sunflowers are bowing their heads, scorched and dry, as they bid farewell for another year.  Just today we’ve seen our first sprinkling of rain for over two months but we need much, much more. In these weeks since the last dusting of rain in late June we’ve had constant temperatures in the high 30s/low 40s during the day and rarely dropping below 28 degrees at night. Even our cats, Perry and Pipi, have struggled to keep cool, often curling up next to one of their drinking bowls so as to not be too far from water when needed.    

But, finally, with a couple of days of rain now forecast, we’re all breathing a cooling sigh of relief, for now at least.