National Trust gardens bloom up to a month early
Noticing how early - or late - the year’s first plants emerge in our gardens is one of the best ways of monitoring the effects of climate change.
Now the National Trust has announced that this spring, many of their gardens bloomed up to a month earlier than usual. Trust gardeners have been reporting they have never known their flowers to appear so early.
Thanks to the relatively mild, but very wet, start to spring, magnolias in the south of England and parts of Wales are blooming four weeks earlier than usual.
Camellias and rhododendrons are also full of flowers and in many places, hedgerows are already producing fresh foliage. Although most of the early blossom has been seen in the south and west of the UK and in London, where the city’s heat regularly prompts early flowering, worldfamous Bodnant Gardens in North Wales is already full of magnolia and rhododendron flowers, while apricots bloomed unusually early in Dyffryn Gardens in South Wales.
Andy Jasper, the director of gardens and parklands at the National Trust, said the early flowering is spectacular but a sign of the climate emergency. He said: “These blooms are a very visual sign of how our seasons are shifting, and the consequences of a rapidly changing climate. The prolonged period of largely wet and mild weather for many areas of the country has meant our trees and plants haven’t really stopped growing or had a particularly long period of shut down.” Andy added that as long as the temperature stays warm, we should be able to look forward to a prolonged blossom season that starts in the south and slowly ripples its way northwards.
Unknown cost of plant border checks
The organisation representing the UK’s horticultural and environmental industries has warned the Government of the dangers of their post-Brexit border policies. On April 30, high-risk plant checks will be transferred to Border Control Posts (BCPs) and the Horticultural Trades Association fears this could have a disastrous impact on plant growers and UK gardeners.
HTA Chairman James Barnes has written to Steve Barclay, the Secretary of State for DEFRA, stating that the ability of BCPs to adequately assess the health of plants and trees is ‘drastically deficient’. There are also concerns that without a proper pricing structure in place for the checks, any tariffs incurred may cause the prices of plants to rise to such an extent they are out of the reach of many gardeners.
Mr Barnes said: “The consequences present a dramatic risk to the breadth of UK horticulture businesses, the majority of which are SMEs, to jobs, biosecurity, environmental target delivery, and the choice available to UK’s
