Fresh eyes now tell us some trees should disappear and new ones be planted elsewhere. More flowering shrubs for a neighbourhood of native birds looking for a feed are on the task sheet too.

A big concern in our work is water. We dig and the ground is dry and compressed. We can't seem to spread enough organic matter and mulch. The Hunter's long drought persists and, probably, another bout of searing hot summer days will be on us shortly. The thought of a green lawn is madness.

Our garden is our heroic connection to the land. But our task is a miniscule one, for across our local valley farmers struggle with the task we summarise inadequately with the word drought. Up the valley things just get worse if that is possible. Scone, for instance, is 40 per cent down on its average rainfall so far this year. But this figure understates the dryness, with one third of Scone's rainfall in 2019 falling on a single day in March. Last year, Scone received only 37 per cent of its long-term average. Add 40-degree days and drying winds and little wonder the earth is baking.

Water for farming is best when it is rhythmic. Stories about the rhythm of water and farming fascinated me in my school geography classes. The annual monsoon across Asia conveniently floods rice paddies. Melting snows from the Sierra Nevada mountains irrigate vast fruit and vegetable fields in an otherwise dry Central Valley. Australia doesn't have these regular rhythms. Our rains come from cold fronts in the winter and thunderstorms in the summer. Predictable falls in the right quantity at the right times make farmers smile. But, while nature can be observed and her patterns learned, she is never predictable in Australia, as Dorothea Mackellar tells us.

Although, for residents in Australia's big cities water has become a predictable thing.

In Sydney, for example, as it shifts from a rambling city of quarter-acre gardens into dense apartment buildings and super-sized houses on mini-sized blocks, water arrives to the kitchen and bathroom as a crystal clear, sanitised, commodity on demand.

In Sydney, water and soil are rarely thought of as a single thing anymore. Water fills harbours and laps beaches. Soil is removed for underground car parks or covered with stencilled concrete driveways. Water and land are foreign countries.

Away from the city, water and soil are one and the same. Soil is a sponge. Soaked with water it supplies nutrients for plants to grow. Gravity and pressure press water into water tables, the store of water from one season to the next. Outflows from the water table keep creeks and rivers running. A clever farmer can steer these flows by positioning dams and levees and permanent stands of trees and shrubs, and retain moisture in the earth-sponge underlying her property.

Famously, Peter Andrews at Tarwyn Park in the Bylong Valley in the upper Hunter pioneered such water capture methods to drought proof his award-winning horse stud property. Yet the NSW Independent Planning Commission will shortly rule on a proposal by Kepco, South Korea's energy utility, for a coal mine in Bylong. The project threatens the water flows underneath Tarwyn Park and the adjoining Bylong properties. It is surely daft at a time of global warming - with higher likelihood of drought, intense heat and wicked westerlies - to close down a successful experiment in water management in order to meet the coal needs of a rich Asian nation with a proud history of care for its own historical landscapes. Who is the winner here?

Apparently Dorothea Mackellar wrote My Country after visiting her family farm Torryburn, just outside Gresford, where she witnessed the breaking of a major drought around 1900. One can easily imagine flooding rains cascading from the slopes in her view, the ragged mountain ranges - the Mount Royal Ranges, and the Barrington Tops - and then water filling dams, percolating, saturating the water table, and filling the earth sponge. Wouldn't it be nice?