January, 17, 2025-03:54
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Gardeners Face Challenges and Celebrate Innovations Amid Changing Climate in 2024
This year has presented significant challenges in the garden. A prolonged, frigid spring gave way to a consistently damp summer.
While this isn’t ideal for many in Britain, it created perfect conditions for slugs, which thrived and feasted on our tender greens.
Despite our attempts with nematodes, beer traps, and crushed eggshells, the only effective solution turned out to be handpicking them during the night.
For next year, I plan to grow seedlings under cover until they are sufficiently robust to resist the onslaught of these molluscs and will also select more slug and snail-resistant varieties.
This experience has shown us that climate change in Britain doesn't necessarily require us to shift towards growing Mediterranean species.
While such plants may flourish in hot, dry summers, they'll often suffer during wetter years.
Instead, we should aim to cultivate a diverse array of plants, hoping that at least some will thrive amid the various weather patterns we might encounter.
We also need to rethink how we manage water in our gardens, whether it’s by creating swale gardens with moisture-loving plants that act as storm drains or installing rainwater butts to help during dry spells.
POSITIVE INSIGHTS
On a brighter note, 2024 ushered in a significant movement towards peat-free gardening, transitioning it from a niche practice to a mainstream one.
This shift is crucial for the preservation of our peat bogs, which take thousands of years to form and serve as vital carbon sinks. Garden centers now offer numerous alternatives, including compost made from materials like bark, coir, wood fiber, and sheep's wool.
The trend of growing your own food continues to gain momentum and shows no signs of waning.
Social media influencers have demonstrated techniques for propagating supermarket basil, regrowing celery and spring onions, and cultivating strawberries, tomatoes, and squash from store-bought seeds. Their daily updates on their flourishing gardens have inspired many of us to appreciate self-sown native plants as well.
These plants often provide essential foraging resources for pollinators such as comfrey, speedwell, lesser celandine, and white deadnettle.
SHOWSTOPPERS
At the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in May, Tom Stuart-Smith's show garden, celebrating nearly a century of the National Garden Scheme, elevated the concept of the humble shed, making everyone covet a cozy spot to relax with a mini-Aga and handmade tools displayed on sustainable wooden walls.
Simultaneously, Holly Johnston's Bridgerton Garden reminded us that our outdoor spaces can offer dreamy, romantic escapes, featuring a planting scheme filled with ferns and ivies, along with a lilac, blue, and pink color palette framed by a ‘moongate’ dry-stone wall.
The RHS Plant of the Year was awarded to Prunus 'Starlight', a cherry that blooms in winter and spring with starry white petals. Close behind was Agave 'Praying Hands', a teardrop-shaped succulent, highlighting the ongoing popularity of houseplants, with ‘plant parents’ always eager for new additions to their collections.
Urban gardening took center stage with the inaugural RHS Urban Show at Depot Mayfield in Manchester, featuring show gardens co-designed by students that demonstrated how much can be cultivated on even the smallest balconies.
Visitors discovered ways to repurpose common household items into planters and learned to select the best plants suited to their specific conditions, be it deep shade or direct