Hot and bothered

Val looks at how climate change affects plants and insects

- Val

I THINK most gardeners realise that our climate is changing, and the statistics back this up. Weather records show that 2019’s average temperature was 1.1°C above the long-term averages recorded between 1961 and 1990. The UK summer of 2018 (June, July and August), was the joint hottest on record since 1884. The 1990s was the warmest decade in Central England since records began in the 1660s.

The climate has changed in my lifetime. When I was a child in the 1950s, living in suburban London, we always had frosts in September. Autumn would be a season of chilly mornings, so you needed a coat and long socks. More urban buildings have increased temperatures, and now frost, if it happens at all in London, is more of a rarity.

This means that the growing season is longer, with the French beans we sowed in early August usually cropping until October as long as they’re fleeced on cold nights. And some plants are not flowering when they used to. I used to think of the herbaceous perennial Clematis heracleifolia as being a September jewel, but now it’s out in July.