Since finishing my exams, I’ve been working in two garden centres as a gardener, a job which has left me feeling very connected to the outdoors and has fulfilled all my whimsical flower fairy aspirations – I get paid to pick tomatoes! I get paid to sow sunflowers!
However, climate change is a theme which has dominated my work life as my other colleagues and I struggled to keep hundreds of plants healthy during a summer with forty days over 30C. There have only been nine recorded occurrences of the temperature exceeding 37C in the UK, three of which happened this year and July (the month I started working at one of the garden centres) was the driest on record. Luckily, as a business, we’ve been exempt from the hosepipe ban, but nonetheless many of our plants have struggled to cope with such scorching temperatures (and watering them has worn us out too).
When conversing with customers, some of them have expressed concerns about buying plants when they’re unable to use a hosepipe or aren’t confident keeping them alive during such extreme weather. This summer, the two main things I’ve learnt from my job is the importance of planting climate resilient plants and gardening as sustainably as possible, with gardens covering an estimated 433,000 hectares of the UK’s land area. Unfortunately, the RHS have estimated that roughly half of the UK’s garden space has been paved over, when the need for green spaces for biodiversity is greater than ever.
This year, many customers have asked me for my recommendations for drought friendly plants. If your garden has particularly dry soil, echinacea (which often comes in quirky bright colours) and agastache are two flowering perennials which have thrived this year. Buddleja has also enjoyed the heat, and is commonly called ‘butterfly bush’ because of its popularity with pollinators, another incentive to plant it in your garden. In terms of trees, olives and almonds have coped well in the hot weather, though they still won’t produce nearly as much crop as they do abroad.
However, many people forget that alongside drier summers, climate change also causes milder, wetter winters, meaning it is important to grow a variety of plants that are both drought and flood resilient. Moreover, this year’s El Nino – described by the Met Office as the “strongest in a lifetime” – is expected to increase the risk of flooding in the UK and wildfires in places like Australia this autumn, already worsened by climate change. Irises are a flower which cope well in very moist conditions and stiff upright grasses like calamagrostis and miscanthus have extensive root systems, benefitting them both in periods of drought and flooding.
Uniflorous plants (flowering plants which only have one flower per stem instead of a cluster) tend to be more disease resilient than multiflorous plants (as the name suggests, these plants have multiple flowers per stem). Extreme weather puts significant pressure on plants, making them more susceptible to diseases like powdery mildew in summer, which we’ve struggled a lot with this year. The plant pathogen Phytophthora, commonly affecting potatoes, is giving horticulturalists a cause of concern because it spreads rapidly in warmer and wetter conditions, the ‘new normal’ of UK winters. Uniflorous plants also tend to be more accessible to pollinators, which is vital because in the last thirty years, the UK’s flying insect population has dropped by 75 per cent, largely thought to be because of climate change. Allowing your grass to grow wild is also beneficial to both insects, birds and larger animals like hedgehogs. At home, our garden is fully organic, which is a crucial step in helping insect populations and encouraging nature. We’ve had a great harvest this year of tomatoes, courgettes and lettuce in particular, showing that organic gardening can still be just as productive as using chemical fertilisers.
In March 2023, the UK government announced a welcome ban on the use of peat in gardening products, which won’t be fully implemented until 2030. Peatlands are a rare habitat, covering just 3% of the earth’s surface, though storing more than 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in the UK alone. Peat extraction is an environmental disaster, releasing fossil fuels, obliterating biodiversity and destroying a habitat which has devastatingly already been damaged by up to 80% in the UK, largely for farming and horticultural industries. On a more positive note however, since the ban, the availability and range of peat free composts has grown exponentially, meaning it’s a must-have essential for your garden.
There are a multitude of other innovative ways to improve sustainability and climate resilience in your garden. Walls with climbing plants growing on them and green roofs have been proved to benefit home insulation, having a cooling effect during summer droughts and providing a flood barrier in wetter winters. It has even been discovered that evergreen hedges reduce particulate pollution, illustrating the widespread benefits gardening can have. At work this year, there was a large demand for water butts as people rightfully aimed to conserve more water. When I was a kid, I left an old kitchen tub full of the water in the back garden after discovering that water features encourage animals to live in your garden. I impatiently checked it the next day, hoping to share my breakfast with any badgers lurking, though unfortunately all it attracted was a few flies. However, if you have the time and space to install even a small pond it can be incredibly beneficial to animals like hedgehogs. Soil stores more carbon than global forests combined, and composting food and garden waste both improves soil quality and prevents your green waste ending up in landfill, where it can produce potent greenhouse gases as it decomposes.
At a Green New Deal Rising climate event recently, I met Martyn from Exeter Seed Bank, an organisation which saves seeds organically, often storing seeds which promote biodiversity and have proved climate resilient in the local area. Exeter Seed Bank regularly holds free and creative seed saving workshops in Devon which I recommend if you found this topic interesting and are considering tangible ways of making your garden more sustainable and climate resilient. The Climate Change Garden by Sally Morgan and Kim Stoddart is also an informative read suitable for all ages if, like me, you’re nerdy about horticulture. It’s kinda chic to grow your own organic produce!
I hope you found this an interesting and informative read, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the issue or provide gardening tips! Feel free to send me an email (my address is mayrosepuckey@gmail.com) or contact me on Instagram or Substack (@mayrosepuckey).
