How a chaotic run of cold, heat and drought is rewriting Britain’s gardens — and hitting blooms from France to Pennsylvania

There is a particular kind of heartbreak reserved for gardeners this year. It isn’t the heartbreak of a late frost catching the dahlias, or a slug getting to the hostas first. It’s quieter and stranger: borders that simply never filled in, fields that were sown with hope and never opened their gates, and garden centres with fuller car parks of shade than of customers.

Britain’s growing season in 2026 has been defined less by any single extreme than by whiplash. A cold, sodden start to the year gave way, with almost no transition, to a run of heatwaves that arrived earlier and hit harder than anything in living memory. The result is a landscape of gardens that look, in places, oddly threadbare — and a horticultural industry openly warning that this may be the shape of summers to come.

A spring that never warmed up gently

The year began wet and cold. Parts of the UK recorded one of the wettest starts in over a century, with waterlogged beds, poor grass growth and lambing seasons disrupted by mud rather than frost. Then, almost without a proper spring in between, May brought an extraordinary early heatwave: Kew Gardens hit 35.1°C on 26 May, smashing the UK’s previous May record by more than two degrees. June followed as England’s warmest on record, and by late June a red extreme-heat warning — only ever issued once before, in 2021 — was in force for three consecutive days as temperatures threatened 40°C.

For plants, that sequence is almost the worst possible order of events. Seeds and seedlings that struggled to establish in cold, sodden soil were then asked, within weeks, to cope with drought stress and scorching heat before they’d built the root systems to survive it. Horticulturists describe the effect as plants “skipping” stages of growth entirely — rushing to flower and set seed prematurely, or simply giving up before they bloomed at all.

Sandringham, sunflowers, and shows under strain

The Royal Horticultural Society, which manages five major public gardens across England, has been explicit that this is no longer a one-off. Citing last year’s severe droughts, the RHS has committed to a run of emergency water-management projects through 2026 — rainwater storage tanks, “ebb and flow” irrigation benches at its retail centres, rain gardens, and a push to get home gardeners doing the same. It’s a striking admission from an institution built on the idea of the reliably beautiful English garden: the organisation is now planning for scarcity as a permanent condition, not an occasional shock.

The disruption has been felt beyond the show gardens, too. In Suffolk, the organisers of Horringer Sunflower Field near Bury St Edmunds announced they would not open this year at all — the field was simply too large to irrigate, and weeks of hoping for rain came to nothing. “We are absolutely gutted,” the organisers said, “but we are hopeful for 2027.” Suffolk was, by that point, under a hosepipe ban after three successive heatwaves left the ground too dry to sustain the crop. Smaller sunflower patches elsewhere reported similar failures — seeds that never germinated because of cold snaps in early May, followed by soil too parched to recover in.

By mid-July, more than eight million UK households were living under hosepipe restrictions, with water companies including Affinity Water, Anglian Water, Cambridge Water, South East Water and Southern Water all imposing bans — several for the first time in decades. Gardeners have been advised to fall back on water butts, greywater from baths and washing-up bowls, and mulching to lock in whatever moisture the soil retains.

Empty aisles, not empty tills

Garden centres, meanwhile, have found that extreme heat is not necessarily good for business — even for a sector selling shade sails and watering cans. Trade body figures showed garden centre visits down roughly 2% in June compared with the same month last year, with gardening sales down as much as 13% against 2024’s benchmark. The pattern echoed the wider high street: British Retail Consortium data recorded UK-wide footfall down 3.4% year-on-year in June, with high streets seeing the sharpest drop — 6.2% — as record heat and red weather warnings kept shoppers indoors or sent them online instead. Industry analysts have pointed to a deeper structural problem: wet springs delay planting and depress early-season sales, then sudden heat spikes create a rush for irrigation kit and shade plants that arrives too late for garden centres to restock in time.

Not just a British problem

The disruption is not confined to the UK. Across Western and Eastern Europe, a sequence of three successive heatwaves has deepened one of the most severe droughts on record, drying out soils, rivers and reservoirs from France to Hungary. Wildfires have forced mass evacuations in France’s Gironde region and burned well over 100,000 hectares in Spain alone, while the Po River in northern Italy has run at historic lows. Scientific attribution studies have found that human-caused climate change made this year’s European drought dramatically more likely — tens of times more likely, in some regions — and estimates put the human cost at thousands of heat-related deaths across the continent, alongside more than a billion pounds in lost working hours in the UK.

The United States is bracing for its own difficult season. Forecasters have pointed to an emerging El Niño pattern and an expanding drought footprint covering the majority of the lower 48 states, prompting gardening advice columns to steer growers toward heat-tolerant flowers — zinnias, cosmos, coneflowers, lantana — over thirstier traditional bedding plants. In Pennsylvania, one long-running sunflower festival was scrapped entirely this summer after drought combined with deer damage to wipe out the crop before it could bloom, echoing the same disappointment felt in Suffolk. Japan, too, is forecast to see another summer of above-normal temperatures nationwide, with the country’s meteorological agency flagging knock-on effects for crop growth alongside the now-familiar heatstroke warnings.

A new kind of gardening

What emerges from all this is less a single freak year than a pattern hardening into a new normal: springs too wet or too cold for plants to establish, followed by heat and drought too extreme for them to bloom on schedule. For gardeners, that is starting to mean rethinking what a garden is for — leaning into drought-tolerant planting, rainwater harvesting and greywater reuse not as niche eco-gardening tips but as basic survival strategy. For institutions like the RHS, it means retrofitting some of the country’s most cherished gardens for scarcity. And for anyone who simply wanted a photo among the sunflowers this July, in Suffolk or in Pennsylvania alike, it has meant a summer of empty fields where the flowers were supposed to be.