Gardeners are always more interested in tomorrow’s weather than yesterday’s. All through the summer — a sequence of heatwaves aggravated by drought — we longed for cooler temperatures and copious quantities of soft, refreshing rain. We had a long wait. By the beginning of August, gardening pundits were telling us that the Mediterranean climate would soon extend to the British Isles and convert our chalk downlands into Europe’s supreme winemaking region.
Buddlejas were a popular suggestion for the future, because they thrive in the driest and hottest of manmade environments, even pavement edges and cracks in masonry. Deep-rooted herbaceous plants were also promoted; eryngiums and echinaceas did particularly well. In my own garden, the only shafts of green in the lawns came from dandelions and plantains. The same logic applied to trees and shrubs: millions of surface-rooting birches turned yellow and, rather to my surprise, so did many small or medium-sized specimens of our native oaks. Are they dead or will they sprout into leaf again next spring? Wait and see.
Roses had the best season that I can remember. They flowered almost continuously and showed no sign of mildew or blackspot. Mind you, modern rose-breeders such as David Austin have been breeding out those fungal diseases. I have always insisted that roses fare best in a Mediterranean climate — Los Angeles in the US or Adelaide in Australia — and pointed out that England’s national flower has traditionally been at the limit of its cultivability in our sodden isles. Not now, perhaps.
I say ‘perhaps’, because we should not assume that hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters are the new norm. There will always be variables. Our coming winter may be unusually cold — back to the freezes of the 1980s. In this case, the salvias, phormiums and cordylines that you thought would live forever in your garden may be killed by much lower temperatures than we have seen for several years.
What effect did the heat of summer have upon nurseries, plant centres and gardens that are open to the public? The RHS garden at Wisley in Surrey notched up a record 62 consecutive days without rain. When I went to the trials grounds in mid August, I found that the grass between the plant beds was not only brown, but worn away completely from being walked on — bare earth and compacted, too. The long double borders that lead up to Battleston Hill, almost the only part of the garden that was irrigated, were a dream of lush horticultural beauty. The gorgeous lagerstroemias and huge-flowered Hibiscus moscheutos responded to the heat by putting on the best show of late-summer colour I have ever seen. There weren’t many visitors, either, which meant that I could photograph the borders with no one to interrupt the fantasy.
It was difficult to find out what effect the weather had on visitor numbers. Press and PR people are sometimes rather protective of their employers’ reputations and prefer to tell a positive story. However, staff at one National Trust garden told me towards the end of June that its visitor numbers were down by 20,000 and they were worried about the effect on their budgets. The general feeling among popular gardens was a dip of about 12% from June to August.
Vicky Flynn at the National Garden Scheme told me that income was 3% down for the year to date — this was in mid August — but that it was ‘infinitely recoverable’. People still want to visit gardens and would start again when the heatwave finished. Yes, quite a number of gardens cancelled their summer openings, but ‘only 20% cited drought-related issues’. The visitors who did brave the heat didn’t mind brown lawns because they were all suffering from drought in their own gardens.
Plant centres fared better than you might suppose. In June, they reported that plant sales dropped by 5%, but then they recovered in July and jumped by 11% year on year. Customers rushed to replace the herbaceous and bedding plants that they had lost. Agapanthus and hemerocallis daylilies sold particularly well.
That speaks volumes for gardeners. We are not discouraged. If we lose a plant, we look for an even better one to replace it. Our love of plants — our commitment to gardening — is not affected by temporary setbacks. My grandmother always quoted Dr Johnson’s remark when hearing of a widow remarrying — gardening represents the triumph of hope over experience.