Where Has All the Little Life Gone?

There are certain creatures we run into so often in a garden that we barely notice them until they're no longer there.

An earthworm turned up by the spade. Woodlice scattering from under a pot. A beetle vanishing into the border before we've properly seen it. Slugs and snails emerging after dark to make a meal of something we'd rather hoped to keep. They're part of the background movement of a garden — sometimes helpful, sometimes irritating, mostly taken for granted.

Then the weather turns exceptionally hot and dry, the ground hardens, and much of that movement seems to stop.

We naturally notice what drought does above ground. Lawns turn brown, leaves scorch, plants stop flowering. Hydrangeas collapse, ferns go crisp, trees drop leaves months before autumn. Those are the changes we can see from the window. But there's another garden underneath our feet going through exactly the same weather, and we don't see that one nearly so easily. It's populated by earthworms, insects, larvae, mites and countless other small creatures, alongside fungi and bacteria too small to see at all — together breaking down dead material, releasing nutrients, opening passages through the soil and quietly making possible much of what happens above them. When the rain stops for long enough, that hidden garden changes too.

The first question is whether all that life has actually disappeared, or whether we've simply stopped finding it. During prolonged dry weather most gardeners do less digging — there's little pleasure in putting a spade into ground that feels like concrete, and it's rarely a sensible time to divide perennials or move established plants. Pots sit where they are, borders get disturbed less often, and the jobs that would normally turn up soil life get postponed. So some of the apparent disappearance may be ours rather than theirs. We've simply stopped looking in the places we'd usually find them.

That isn't the whole explanation, though. Earthworms need moisture to breathe through their skin, and they can't stay active near the surface indefinitely once the soil around them dries out. Some travel further down in search of cooler, damper conditions. Others make a small chamber, curl tightly inside it and drop into a state of reduced activity called aestivation — a bit like dormancy, though different worms use different strategies. There's no single answer to where the worms go, because there's no single kind of earthworm living in the garden. Some spend most of their lives close to the surface among decaying leaves. Some live in the upper layers of soil, making largely horizontal passages. Others dig permanent vertical burrows that carry them much further down. A deep-burrowing worm has somewhere cooler to retreat to; a surface-dwelling one has far fewer options once the leaf litter and topsoil have dried out completely.

The reassuring version of the story is that they're all safely asleep beneath us, ready to reappear at the first proper rain. The truth's probably a bit less tidy. Some will survive by moving or going inactive. Some persist as cocoons until conditions come right again. And some won't survive a drought that's too severe or goes on too long. Disappearance doesn't necessarily mean death — but we can't assume everything hidden from us has come through unharmed, either.

Much of the rest of a garden's small life shows the same mix of retreat and risk. Slugs and snails depend heavily on moisture, which is why they're so active on damp evenings and so obvious after rain. In hot, dry spells they withdraw into whatever's cooler — beneath stones, behind pots, inside cracks, under dense growth, anywhere with a bit of humidity left in it. Some snails seal themselves inside their shells to cut water loss. It may be the only summer gardeners have found themselves faintly concerned by the absence of slugs.

Woodlice need humid surroundings too, and many beetles and other invertebrates go looking for whatever shelter's still available. A compost heap, a pile of logs, the shaded space behind a water butt, the narrow gap under a large pot — places that look entirely insignificant to us can become, during a drought, the difference between an animal finding refuge and having nowhere left to go.

That might explain why the experience varies so much from one garden to the next. Some gardeners describe an extraordinary quiet — fewer worms, fewer insects, fewer birds, very little moving through the borders. Others, sometimes only a street away, report gardens full of butterflies, hoverflies, bees, beetles and birdsong. Weather alone doesn't explain that gap. A garden with a pond, dense planting, long grass, mature shrubs, compost heaps and shaded corners offers a far wider range of conditions than an open garden with closely cut grass and bare soil, and even through an extreme spell there can be pockets where moisture holds on.

A pond does more than give birds somewhere to drink — it cools the air immediately around it and supports insects, amphibians and other creatures whose presence spreads outward through the whole garden. Dense planting shades the soil. Fallen leaves slow the loss of moisture. Logs and stones create protected spaces underneath them. A full border shelters its own ground in a way a sparsely planted one simply can't. We tend to think of these as wildlife features. They're also climate refuges.

That distinction matters, because the little life in a garden isn't a collection of separate creatures — it's a web. If worms retreat deeper into hard ground, blackbirds can't reach them as easily. If insects go quiet, birds and bats have to search harder for food elsewhere. If slugs vanish into cracks nothing else can reach, the creatures that eat them lose a food source too. When fungi and soil organisms slow down, so does the decomposition of dead material and the movement of nutrients through the soil. A dry garden isn't simply a collection of thirsty plants. It's an entire living system under pressure.

Worth staying cautious about firm conclusions from what we happen to notice, though. A blackbird missing from one garden hasn't necessarily gone because it can't find worms — birds move for food, shelter, disturbance, and the shifting stages of their own year, and many go quiet and secretive in late summer while moulting. The end of the breeding season brings a natural drop in birdsong anyway, so a quieter garden isn't automatically an empty one. Equally, plenty of butterflies in one garden doesn't prove the drought's done no harm, any more than very few proves they've all died. Our gardens give us observations, not controlled experiments. But those observations still matter, especially gathered over time.

That sudden quiet makes us notice connections that were always there. The bird turning over leaves depends on what's living underneath them. A pot standing on the patio turns out to be creating a patch of shaded, humid habitat. An untidy pile of logs is doing far more useful work than its appearance suggests.

Then the rain comes, and the garden seems to wake up. Worms move nearer the surface, slug trails reappear across the paving, birds start probing the softened ground, fungi come up in lawns and borders almost overnight. The quiet world underneath the garden gets busy enough that we notice it again.

Even so, it's worth remembering that one shower doesn't end a drought. Rain can wet the surface while the soil stays dry a few inches below. Ground baked properly hard may shed water at first rather than absorb it. Pots can look damp on top while the compost around the root ball is still bone dry. Rivers, ponds and reservoirs take far longer to recover than a lawn does. The return of visible activity is encouraging. It isn't the same thing as full recovery.

There's often a sudden burst of activity when dry soil gets rewetted — microorganisms respond, decomposition starts again, the soil begins releasing and cycling nutrients. It's less like switching a machine back on and more like a crowded room starting to talk again after a long silence. Not everyone comes back at once, and not every relationship picks up exactly where it left off.

We can't irrigate a whole garden indefinitely for the sake of every organism living in it, and that probably wouldn't be the right answer anyway. But we can make it easier for a garden to hold on to a variety of conditions. Covering soil with plants or a decent mulch shades it and cuts moisture loss. A shallow source of water helps birds and insects, so long as it's kept reasonably clean and gives anything that falls in a safe way out — ponds are even more useful with gently sloping sides or stones creatures can use to get in and out. Compost heaps, log piles and undisturbed corners give cool refuge. Leaving some growth standing a little longer, rather than clearing everything at once, keeps cover in place. A few pots grouped together create shade between and beneath them. Larger shrubs and small trees add another layer of shelter again.

None of this asks us to abandon the garden. It just means recognising that tidiness and resilience aren't always the same thing. A garden stripped of every fallen leaf, hollow stem, shaded corner and rotting bit of wood may look wonderfully orderly, and in extreme weather it offers almost nowhere for small life to retreat to.

There's a case, too, for resisting the urge to dig into everything the moment the ground softens after rain. That's exactly when creatures that have spent weeks sheltering start moving again. Leaving some areas alone gives the garden a bit of time to respond before our tools turn up.

What interests me most is how quickly absence changes our attitude. We complain about worms when their casts turn up on the lawn. We complain about woodlice found somewhere inconvenient. We certainly complain about slugs and snails. But when all of them seem to vanish at once, the garden feels strangely incomplete. It turns out we don't only value the creatures we find attractive — we value the movement itself, the evidence that a garden's alive beyond the plants we chose and arranged. Even the ones that frustrate us have a place in something larger, and their absence leaves a silence that flowers alone can't fill.

Next time the ground's been properly wetted, it might be worth lifting a pot that's stood undisturbed, or looking under a piece of old wood. Not to interfere. Just to look.

There may be worms close to the surface again, woodlice gathered in the damp, a beetle waiting for darkness, or — inevitably — a slug getting ready to pick up exactly where it left off. We may not be thrilled to welcome every one of them back. But after a garden's been quiet long enough, even a slug can feel like proof that something's survived.

Happy Gardening.

Marcus

© 2026. All rights reserved.

Marcus Bergin

Thoughts, observations and conversations from a life spent in gardens.