We only saw next door’s bees all summer. Our garden seemed devoid of all insects
Over the last few days, I’ve been rounding up all the tender plants in the garden and moving them to the greenhouse. It is heavy work and as I dragged yet another pot of salvias up the two flights of steps that separate the lower and upper terraces, I did start to wonder if the effort was worth it.
We live in the south west of Scotland, just a mile from the coast, so winters here are seldom fierce, but over the last few years they’ve seemed to melt into an extended period of prolonged autumnal weather, with nothing in the way of a cold snap. Our climate is changing, but the problem for gardeners is that it isn’t moving from one stable state to another, but instead it is in constant flux, a swirling mix of high winds in summer, dry spells and soaring temperatures when we least expect them.
I was alerted to this several years ago when I talked to a graduate student who was working on the problem of drought in Scotland.
It seemed an unlikely
proposition, but then she showed me evidence of successive arid springs that
were causing peat bogs to dry out and I realised that climate disruption was no longer the distant threat that I had hoped it was. Change was already upon us.
Now that there are no more certainties, knowing what to plant is proving problematic. In the most recent copy of the Royal Horticultural Society’s magazine, The
Garden, scorched hydrangeas are the biggest concern for readers whose gardens were affected by this summer’s hot weather. I’ve lost count of how many conversations I’ve had about cosmos still flowering in November and increasingly I’m hearing about gardeners who are tempted to leave their dahlias in the ground over winter. They feel the threat of frost is so slight, that lifting and storing the tubers now doesn’t seem worth the effort.
The advice we are getting from the experts is to seek out plants that are adaptable, that can cope with heat and drought and which will continue to thrive if conditions are wet and miserable. And by adaptable I don’t mean that they should flower regardless, but that they can survive and recover from adverse conditions.
This summer in my garden, clematis and bistorts gave up early because of the hot weather but they suffered no lasting damage, while many of the shrubs, including the magnolia, produced an unexpected second flush of flowers at the end of the long, hot summer. Meanwhile I’ve come to the conclusion that the secret of survival lies less in the choice of plants, but in the condition of the soil, which, at its best, should be free-draining yet still hold moisture. The addition of large quantities of organic material is the key to making this possible, improving the structure so that it provides support to the widest possible range of plants, regardless of the weather.
But gardens also need pollinators and climate change is having a devastating effect on these. I’ve been worrying all year about the lack of butterflies and I knew that we were in trouble back in February, when a succession of large wasps flew in through the bathroom window. These were queens, tricked out of hibernation too early by a spell of unseasonably warm weather, and doomed to die when the temperature dipped again. As a result we saw hardly a single wasp in the garden all summer and if it wasn’t for the bees from our neighbour’s hives, then our garden this year would have been almost devoid of insects.
Getting rid of pesticides and plastics, limiting the use of peat and doing all we can to improve our soil and support bird life, insects and invertebrates are the least we can do as gardeners and we also need to relearn much of what we thought we knew about what makes our gardens thrive.
More Agnes inside