WHEN did you last empty your bath out on to your lawn?

It’s not an easy task, humping heavy buckets up and down the stairs, with water sloshing over the top, but it is one which I carried out a couple of times last week in an attempt to keep alive what looks like a large area of sandpaper outside our house. I am not alone. One of my neighbours did the same, complaining about how it nearly broke her back.

When you haven’t had any rain for weeks, maintaining your garden can be a tough job. Coming home from work, my spirits plummet at the thought of at least an hour’s watering, filling the can from the outside tap and reviving the plants in pots, each drooping after the unrelenting heat of the day. Then there’s the flower beds…

It’s a cut-throat business. You water one plant, you feel obliged to water the next, and the next… As living things, I have a - probably stupid - notion of each plant watching me, thinking: “Why not me? Please come to me, I’m parched…”

As the dry spell continues, the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) announced that it is hiring a ‘water specialist’ to teach British gardeners how to ‘drought-proof’ their gardens during hot summers. Questions from desperate gardeners asking how to save dry gardens have increased by 26 per cent this year, with the organisation expecting the number to rocket further as the heatwave continues.

To minimise the impact of soaring temperatures on gardens, the RHS is working with Cranfield University in Bedfordshire to train the UK’s first garden water scientist. He or she will explore ways to improve water provision in gardens by adopting new technologies and practices, and encouraging behavioural change among gardeners. All findings will be released free online.

With water being such a precious commodity, I would never resort to a hosepipe, and from the look of lawns, neither would most people, although I have spotted the occasional sprinkler in use. In todays Kalahari-type landscape, people wear their yellow lawns like a badge of pride. A lush green one - like the Queen's lawns at Windsor Castle, which were exposed in the Press last week - would attract black looks and disparaging comments.

Talk of hosepipe bans reminds me of the summer of 1995, when reservoirs ran almost dry, when water was transported across Yorkshire by tanker, and swimming pools, including Ilkley Lido, were emptied to help ease the crisis.

It kept us journalists busy for months. I remember getting into trouble for failing to recognise the newsworthiness of one story - the Yorkshire Water boss revealing that he had not had a bath for three months, but took showers instead. Not so unusual, I thought - I have a shower-obsessed husband who has not taken a bath for 20 years. But the story made national headlines.

Of course, what we call ‘drought’ isn’t anything in comparison with droughts in the developing world, where, in baking hot climates, rain does not fall for many months, leading to widespread famine and countless deaths. All we have to worry about is parched grass and the demise of a few plants.

But it’s all relative. In the UK we are simply not accustomed to long, dry spells. Most years, we are lucky to have a weekend of dry weather, let alone two months. So when it happens, whether gardeners of not, we struggle to cope.

There are, however, some advantages for gardeners in this prolonged dry spell. Our lawn normally needs mowing once a week, but the grass has not grown at all. This has pleased my husband, who is always assigned the exhausting task, immensely.