Climate and Land – how climate change may affect gardens

This website isn’t about the effects of climate change on gardens but about how we gardeners can help to reduce climate change.

Yet even if we all – gardeners and everybody else – manage to reduce our greenhouse emissions, we cannot avoid the climate change that we’ve already caused, so climate-friendly gardeners still need to be aware of how that climate change may affect our gardens.

We’re going to get more extremes of weather, and the worst effects here in Britain are likely to be the warmer, drier summers, which may kill or weaken many of our plants, and which may tempt many gardeners to use even more tapwater to try to keep their gardens green – and that would just cause more climate change.

Here are some useful links from the Royal Horticultural Society on how climate change may affect gardens:
Gardening in a Changing World
Gardening in a Changing Climate

Met Office Chief Scientist Julia Slingo gave a lecture for the Royal Horticultural Society in November 2012 on ‘Gardening and the changing UK weather’:
video clip of Julia Slingo talking about the lecture
summary
full video

A very thorough book, well worth reading, is ‘Gardening in the Global Greenhouse: The impacts of climate change on gardens in the UK’ by Richard Bisgrove and Paul Hadley, 2002, UK Climate Impacts Programme:
summary
full technical report
An updated version is being produced and should be available soon…

It’s also worth checking out Deborah Scott Anderson’s website, Climate Gardens, about the impacts of climate change on gardens.

Although Farming Futures is concerned with farming and climate change, their website is still packed with information that’s relevant to gardeners as well.