Fallen giants, harvesting water and kitchen gardens

We have a sneak peek at what’s on the horizon for 2025, share a clever tip for harvesting water, and delve into the challenge of fallen trees and the big question: what to plant in their place

Welcome to the first edition of The Climate Change Garden for 2025. I'm Sally Morgan, an organic gardener and botanist who loves to experiment. Here you can read about matters relating to climate change, sustainability, organic gardening, and growing veg, all helping you to become a climate savvy gardener.

🌱✨ A Happy New Gardening Year to you all 🌸🌿

And a huge thank you for being part of the Climate Change Garden community.

First up is my most popular Advent tip. For those of you who use Notes, you may have seen my series of Advent tips for creating a more climate-resilient garden. They proved to be very popular, especially number 19 which I have included here :

Harvesting water

Every home should be harvesting water, even if it’s as simple as installing a single water butt. Two pieces of news caught my attention today: a significant hike in water prices over the next five years and a report of thousands of homes near Southampton left without water due to an issue at a local treatment plant. Seeing lines of cars waiting for bottled water, I couldn’t help but think how useful it would be to have a backup supply just to flush a toilet.

With water becoming an increasingly scarce resource globally, it feels wasteful to use clean tap water on gardens. Collecting rainwater via water butts, one-cubic-metre IBC tanks, or dipping ponds is straightforward and effective. All new homes should also be equipped with grey water systems and underground rainwater storage tanks to promote water conservation.

Even allotmenteers can harvest water and reduce their water charges, using the roofs of sheds, greenhouses and polytunnels On our farm allotments, where there’s no piped water, allotmenteers have gotten creative, building these DIY roof structures which they use to harvest thousands of litres, proving that with a little ingenuity, we can all make better use of this precious resource.

Don’t worry if you missed the Advent Tips, I’m putting them together in a single pdf which you will be able to download.

Fallen giants

Recent weeks have brought a series of powerful storms, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. Among the most notable was Storm Darragh, which caused extensive damage to the National Trust’s Bodnant Garden in North Wales. The clean-up costs are estimated at over £150,000, with the loss of around 30 mature trees, including some historically significant specimens. They included a Greek fir (Abies cephalonica) planted in 1881 by the garden's founder, Henry Davis Pochin, which was declared Wales Champion Tree for Girth in 2016.

This loss follows the devastation caused by Storm Arwen in November 2021, which uprooted 50 trees, including a 140-year-old, 52m champion coast redwood and a rare larch. Sadly, this isn’t the first time the area has faced such damage; in Christmas 2015, storms brought significant flooding and damage to both Bodnant and nearby Plas Cadnant Gardens on Anglesey.

This region of North Wales is influenced by the North Atlantic and the Gulf Stream. It has a temperate maritime climate, characterized by shifting Atlantic air masses. The garden at Bodnant, now approaching its 150th anniversary, was originally planted with a diverse array of non-native trees. At the time, the climate was cooler and wetter, with mild summers, year-round rainfall, and often harsh winters.

Over the past few decades, storms have become more frequent and severe, bringing stronger winds and heavier rainfall. Events that were once considered "once-in-a-generation" now occur with unsettling regularity. So, the National Trust and the gardeners at Bodnant face the tricky challenge of selecting trees that can replace these fallen giants and thrive in the climate of the future.

This mirrors the dilemma faced by gardens and estates across the UK: what trees should be planted today to ensure they can cope with the environmental conditions of the next century?

My veteran trees

The report from Bodnant made me think of my own veteran oak trees. When we moved to the farm 20 years ago, the front field with its large oaks grabbed my attention - a wood pasture with six veteran oak trees, and the best specimen by far was a classic pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) with a perfect umbrella-shaped crown.

Then one day in April 2020, I was standing in the allotments when a huge bang reverberated around the farm and for a moment I thought the barn roof had caved in, such was the force of the sound. Eventually, I noticed that my favourite tree had shed two of its large limbs. And since then, it has shed another.

But its still standing, although a shadow of its former self and I suspect its days are numbered. Despite the many offers from people in the village to ‘clear’ away the wood, I have left the limbs where they fell to allow the wood to decay and complete the cycle of life. It’s been fascinating to see how the mosses, fungi and hedgerow plants have moved in, taking advantage of the increased light levels, deep leaf litter and lack of competition.

I have long wondered about the life this tree has experienced and the weather it has endured. What was the climate like when it was a sapling, for example, or when it was reaching maturity? By measuring its girth, I came up with an estimated age of around 250 years. It stands alone without the competition of others, so its growth rate is faster than that of a woodland tree, so roughly 2.5 cm a year, which makes it around 250 years old. That takes it back to 1775 – quite an auspicious year for our US readers. The start of the War of Independence. So that gives you an idea of just how long this tree has stood in the front field, alongside a hedge that I have dated to at least 1500. [I live in Templecombe, which is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 and is associated with the Knights Templar]

I suspect my veteran may date back to 1786 - a year that experience a huge storm which felled swathes of trees across the south of England, so may be this tree sprung up in the shadow of an uprooted oak tree?

What was the weather like in 1786?

I dug back into the meteorological records to get a taste of the weather since 1786 using the resources of weatherweb.net so here are a few highlights from the last 250 years.

My tree started off life at the tail end of the Little Ice Age when cold winters were the norm, rivers froze over, storms delivered lots of rain and many of the summers were cool and wet.

Meteorologically, this period in history was marked by the 1783 Laki eruption in Iceland, that produced clouds of ash that drifted across Europe creating a sulphurous haze that may have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, including an estimated 23,000 people in the UK. The presence of ash in the atmosphere led to a period of global cooling with cold winters and poor summers, failed crops and poverty. North America was affected too, with winters between 1784 and 1787 being amongst the coldest and longest on record. There were huge snow falls, sea ice in Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, while rivers such as the Mississippi froze over.

The poor weather led to crop failures and rising bread prices so by the late 1780s and early 1790s Great Britain was in turmoil and there was social unrest. There were similar problems in Europe, with the poor weather and crop failures contributing to the start of the French Revolution in 1789.

The first half of the 19^th century continued to be under the influence of the waning Little Ice Age as well as various major volcanic eruptions, including Tambora in 1815 (The Year Without Summer) and Zavaritski in 1831. There were frequent wet years, cold winters, poor summers and just a handful of dry years. The 1810s was one of the coldest decades ever recorded.

These cold, wet years continued through the following decades, leading to famine in parts of Scotland and Ireland, which resulted in mass migration to Canada and the USA. Blight virtually wiped out the Irish potato crop in the mid 1840s and between 1846 and 1851 around one million died of starvation and disease, and by 1855, two million had emigrated.

In 1883, Krakatoa erupted and the resulting dust in the atmosphere caused a global cooling of 0.5^oC which lasted several years.

The winter of 1894-95 was known as the Winter of the Twelve Week Frost. It lasted from the end of Dec to mid March. Snow covered the land and ice floes were seen on the Thames. A record low temperature of -27^oC was recorded at Braemar in February.

The first few decades of the 20^th century were mild and there was a gradual rise in the average global surface temperatures until 1940. But the severe winter of 1939-40 at the start of the Second World War not only had an impact on the course of the war, but marked the beginning of another period of cooling. The weather was so poor during the 1950s and 60s that the growing season in the UK declined by two weeks! The cooling was believed to be the result of industrial pollution creating atmospheric aerosols that blocked out sunlight.

Winters were cold, especially that of 1962-63 when parts of the country were covered in snow for 60 days. Known as the Big Freeze – it was the coldest winter of the 20^th century. There were ice floes in the Thames estuary while the River Thames froze over at Hampton Court. The ground was frozen to a considerable depth so farmers in East Anglia resorted to digging up carrots with pneumatic drills! Read more here Then in February 1963, Mt Agung in Bali erupted and global surface temps dropped by 0.4^oC over the next three years.

During the 1970s, the global climate was in the news but for a different reason. Meteorologists predicted global cooling and there was a widespread fear that the world was about to tip into another ice age.

There were a few blips. I remember 1976 which at the time, was the hottest ever summer on record - temperatures soared into the high 20^oCs in late June through into July, including 15 days where temps exceeded 32^oC somewhere in the UK. I have vague recollections of having to collect water from a bowser in the street as the water supply had failed.

Global cooling continued until 1980 - there were disastrous harvests in the former Soviet Union but while some regions of the world experienced cooling, there was drought and famine across North Africa.

And then temperatures started to climb again and here we are today

And another memorable event that I am sure many UK readers will remember - The Great Storm of 16 Oct 1987, which changed the landscape of the southern England overnight. I awoke in the morning to find our local wood had been flattened, roads were blocked, power lines down. More than 15 million trees across the South East had been uprooted. I was a volunteer with the Surrey Wildlife Trust at the time, and it was heart breaking to tour the reserves and survey the damage – the amazing veteran trees, the bluebell and orchid woods all lost. Almost 40 years on there has been regeneration and replanting, but its not the same.

My trees survived all this. So what next?

My wood pasture is dominated by veteran trees, so I need to plant a new generation but what type of trees? Somerset is predicted to become significantly warmer and drier over the next 75 years, with more frequent and intense heat waves. By the end of the century, winters are likely to be warmer by as much as 4^oC and snow will become increasingly rare with the chances of a cold winter just 1%, so very different to those conditions that my veteran grew up in.

Do I stay with native species? Or should I go for a non-native oak. I already have a Caucasian Oak (Quercus macranthera), planted more than 70 years ago by a previous occupant of the farm, a non-native from Caucasus region of Europe and it is thriving.

The distribution of the pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) extends across Europe into western Asia and as far south as Spain and Italy, so it should be able to cope with drier summers. So what about sourcing of genetic material from other parts of Europe, to bring in those genotypes that are adapted to coping with drier and warm weather? This is called assisted gene flow - moving seeds to new locations within the present distribution range to help their survival. Or does a tree that has been around 250 years and survived all sort of weather, produce seeds with enough resilience to cope with the climate that is to come? I don’t have answers, but my instinct is to stay with oak but to source acorns from Kent perhaps?

Meanwhile, the tree is taking its future into its own hands - there is a sapling in the shadow of the old tree. A new generation is coming.

A sapling has emerged in the shadow of the old tree

Coming up in 2025

I love visiting kitchen gardens. I’m one of those people who will visit a historic house, but skip the house so I can spend more time in the garden. I wrote about a few kitchen gardens back in September which proved to be popular, so once a month, one of the weekly posts will be focussed on kitchen gardens. If you missed the posts here are the links

But its not just going to be a straight forward report of a visit. The kitchen gardens that really resonate with me are those that are growing something new or unusual, or they are using innovative methods. An idea that I can take away. And its these ideas I want to share with you to help you create more resilient veg plots.

And I’d love you to contribute

If you have visited a kitchen garden that inspired you to grow something new or try a new method, I’d love you to write a short report that I can share with everybody. It has to be a kitchen garden that is open to the public, if only for a couple of days a year, but it can be anywhere in the world.

Happy Gardening

Sally

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