Making decisions for your garden and yard is often a yearly exercise. But for long-lived perennials, you need to start thinking about how climate change is going to impact your region. But don't start loading up on olive trees just yet...
Today on the Reversing Climate Change podcast, Sally Morgan, coauthor of The Climate Change Garden: Down to Earth Advice for Growing a Resilient Garden, teaches host Ross Kenyon about how to cope with a simultaneously drier and wetter world. What happens when temperate zones become Mediterranean? And what happens to zones already Mediterranean?!
Tune in this week to get your mind working on gardening in a climate-changed future.
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The Climate Change Garden: Down to Earth Advice for Growing a Resilient Garden
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon, I’m one of the co-founders of Nori, which is a carbon removal marketplace based in Seattle, Washington. And today I have with me Sally Morgan, co-author of The Climate Change Garden: Down to Earth Advice for Growing a Resilient Garden. Thanks for being here, Sally.
Sally Morgan: I’m delighted, thank you for inviting me.
Ross Kenyon: I’m so happy to have you. We’ve not done a show quite like this before. You’re a longtime gardener and educator, and I imagine you’ve seen quite a lot of climate change just through your work and how you interact with plants. Is that a true assumption, or is it maybe less than maybe?
Sally Morgan: No, I think you’re spot on, and I think as gardeners we’re at the forefront of climate change, experiencing what’s happening firsthand. So we tend to pick up on things, and I’m quite a sort of note-taker and a diary-maker in my gardening. So I can look back over my gardening records and sort of think, well, that happened there before, and things like that. So yes, I’m quite good at that type of record keeping, and we are seeing changes, and we’re seeing changes more quickly than I’ve seen perhaps in my lifetime. So, interesting times.
Ross Kenyon: Is it something as simple as some months maybe sunnier or wetter or drier than previous years, or pests or birds arriving at different times? Or is it stuff I can [unclear]?
Sally Morgan: Yeah, absolutely. It will be unusual weather patterns. So we’re getting more of these extreme weather events, and by extreme I’m thinking lots of rain in a very short period of time. So I know several North American cities have had more than six inches in a 24-hour period, and that is extreme. We’ve had the same over here just a couple of weeks ago — very heavy rainfall, a month’s worth of rain in a few hours. And then when I look back, I’m seeing things flowering perhaps earlier. And we know that records in the UK are showing that our spring is advancing by five days every 10 years. So that is quite some change, and so it’s those types of indicators that tell us that not all is the same as it used to be.
Ross Kenyon: On a previous show, a guest had mentioned that southern England has a growing viticulture scene and winemaking, which I think should be a shocking fact. That is not something that I associate with southern England. But then again, you note in the book too that in Roman times there was winemaking in southern England. So maybe it’s not nearly as dramatic as it appears. Or is it?
Sally Morgan: Well, yeah, 2,000 years ago the Romans were over here. They did grow vines, they were growing lentils and other Mediterranean crops. And then we had a little ice age that lasted, and we have historic images of people skating on ice, fairs on the Thames. And then you have some unusual weather events in North America where there were huge dumps of snow — you know, 48, 56 inches of snow overnight, some mega events. But that was changing more slowly. So it took hundreds of years for the weather changes to fully kick in, and it took hundreds of years to come out of those changes. And I think what makes this period, the last hundred years, particularly different is the rate of change and the difficulty of the natural world keeping up with those changes. So yeah, we’ve seen it all before, but not quite as quickly.
And in terms of vineyards in southern England — yep, we have lots of vineyards. In fact, lots of French champagne houses are buying up bits of Kent and Sussex, because they know that in 20, 30 years’ time the Champagne area of France will get warmer, and there is the same geology that exists on both sides of the Channel. So the chalky soils that are south of Paris pop under the Channel and pop up in Kent. So from a viticulture point of view the conditions are virtually the same. And so they are preparing for 20 or 30 years’ time, and we’ve got some cracking — can’t call it champagne now — we have some great English sparkling wine.
Ross Kenyon: I have a gardener who helps around our house, and he’s predicting that Seattle is going to face a much more Mediterranean climate as things go forward, which is also just a scary sentence. But as a gardener, I’m also thinking several years, even decades into the future, of what trees should I be planting, what kinds of plants should I be preparing for to be resilient in the future. And this is why your book was so appealing to me, because there’s seemingly an endless amount of work and forethought that should go into which plants and which kinds of spaces you’re ecologically designing and working with. And it’s pretty daunting to think that far ahead, or that we need to think that far ahead.
Sally Morgan: Yeah, it’s very difficult. I was actually in Seattle back in February for the Northwest Flower and Garden Festival, and that type of topic cropped up. Yes, Seattle is predicted, along with the rest of the North Pacific coast — the Pacific coasts — to warm up. I think actually if I was in Seattle, the thing that worries me mostly is the threat from flooding, but we can come back to that. But in terms of choosing a plant — I mean a plant that’s going to be there for 50 to 100 years or longer, because some of the forestry rotations can be hundreds of years — it’s really difficult to pick a tree that will work today and will work in 50 years’ time.
And so this is where I feel some of the more exciting research is being done at the moment, looking at the genetics of trees. And so a lot of British Columbian foresters are looking at some of their seedlings and are seeing where they’re planting them across a huge range, from California right to the Alaskan border, to see which of those seedlings do best in the more extreme climates, and use those as their genetic source. So if you want to stick to the same varieties and species, you might want to look at the genetics, look at their distribution, and try and find a seed material or propagation material that comes from a more southerly area, so perhaps it’s still got the genes which will allow it to survive more extreme climate conditions, rather than plant non-natives, which does get people quite excited.
But it’s also important in our urban areas. And again, I was wandering around Seattle looking at the trees, and there’s not a huge variety of trees being grown, and this is true of cities around the world. And there is a very good academic from Sweden called Henrik Sjöman whose work really appeals to me. And he’s been looking at European cities and North American cities and looking at their range of trees. And city designers tend to stick to a few tried and tested species. So when I was in London yesterday, there’s lots of London plane, lots of native lime trees, but there’s not a huge variety. So when a new pest arrives or the conditions change — so I’m thinking Japanese beetles, citrus longhorn beetles over here — when they arrived, they could wipe out entire populations of our urban trees.
So we need variety there, and we need to plan for the future. And one of those ways to plan, perhaps, is to have more variety in our gardens, in our community spaces, so if one fails we might have a backup, as well as thinking ahead to which species. And again, when I look at his research, he may often recommend that you don’t use the current species that grows well, but you look at a close relative that maybe is better suited. So for us in the UK, we have lots of native lime trees which are going to be suffering in 20 to 30 years’ time. But the silver lime, which is more common in Mediterranean areas, is more adaptable to warmer summers. So maybe we should be growing a silver lime rather than a native lime. And there’s lots of North American species where you can do the same thing. You can switch the species, but as soon as you start talking non-native, people get very excited.
Ross Kenyon: From what I’ve read in gardening discourse — you’re obviously much closer to this than I am — but I feel a hybridized approach has been popular. People know that the genie’s out of the bottle for non-native species, and it’s more a question of adaptation and how to do it in a smart way, rather than take a very strongly ideological position. Does that map with your experience, or not so much?
Sally Morgan: Yeah, I mean, I think when the conditions are changing, and they’re changing so quickly, and the native species do not survive, then you can’t continue to control and grow them. You can ameliorate the environment to see if they would survive, but other than looking at their genetics and trying to widen their gene pool, to bring in, as I say, propagated material from a more southerly region, we do have to also try a non-native to see whether that will survive.
Or just simply — I think diversity. My own garden, I’m trying to make it more diverse, from all the planting, through from the vegetables through to trees, in the hopes that when conditions become more extreme — and, you know, we’ve got flipping at the moment, we’ve got hot summers, dry summers, and then we get these really cold and then wet and mild weather. And I need a really resilient plant that can cope with all those flips from one side to the other. So my drought-tolerant planting won’t work this winter. We’ve had lots of rain, there’s lots of snails out at the moment, and it didn’t suit them. And so we need to have that diversity, I think, across our plantings, in community spaces and in our gardens, to hedge our bets, so that something hopefully will be able to cope with what’s thrown at it.
Ross Kenyon: Which kinds of plants can tolerate that extreme range of rain and drought? Or are there certain families that do well, or how should one think about that?
Sally Morgan: It’s difficult to actually pick out ones. And what I’ve been advising people is, when you look on labels at garden centres and when you’re buying a plant, it often comes with the label that sort of says good for sun, good for shade, good for acidic soils, alkaline soils, frost hardy or whatever. I’m looking for that plant in the short term, while we’re in this transition period where things flip from one side to another. I’m looking for a really quite resilient plant that ticks all those boxes. And so I’m looking for a plant that in the UK, for example, will grow from the south right through to Scotland, and you see it in every garden centre, and it’s probably not a very exciting plant, but it will grow in the sun, it will grow in the shade, it’ll grow in all soil types, it will cope with drought but it will also cope with waterlogging. And that is the type of adaptable plant that you need.
But if any of your listeners are interested in this, again going back to Henrik Sjöman, he has got an amazing little manual, downloadable online, where he has looked at not only the drought tolerance of many species of trees that we see in our gardens and cities, but also their resilience to waterlogging. Because when we have four or five inches of rain in a very short period of time, the ground gets waterlogged, and plants have to cope with wet feet and wet roots for six or seven hours, possibly several days. So you need a plant that can cope with that and being cold and wet in winter, as well as hot and dry. And that’s a big ask. And so these adaptable plants are out there, and it’s finding the one that suits your area.
So Henrik is a great one to have a look at in the first instance. And then look at the label, look at things that grow in all environments, in the hopes that it can cope and it will be a very generalist, adaptable plant that will sort of deal with everything. So maybe not the specialist — it’s going to be more of a generalist, to my mind.
Ross Kenyon: Interesting set of ideas here. In addition to plant choice, it seems that one of the main things one can do to be resilient is to have healthy soil and to have just a healthy ecosystem in one’s yard, that would better allow for plants of all varieties to flourish. Is that the right way to understand this?
Sally Morgan: Yeah, so soil is gardeners’ most important asset, and I think we treat it quite badly. In many cases I go into garden centres, I see rows and rows of chemicals that you can apply to your soil, and you’re going to kill that pest and you’re going to kill that weed, and then you’ve got to fertilise the plant so they grow really hard and big and lush, which means they’re more vulnerable to pests. So a healthy soil for me is one that has rich soil life, because there’s this most amazing connection of plants with the soil life around their roots, more than we really know. And when I read some of the work of Merlin Sheldrake — when you look at mushrooms and you look at fungal hyphae growing through the soil, all those plants are in connection with each other and they’re communicating. And a healthy plant is feeding the soil, and that soil life is then taking the nutrients and making them available to the plants. It’s a two-way exchange and benefit.
And so for me, when I’m looking after my soil, it is not disturbing it, not putting my fork into it often. So a lot of no-till gardening that we see in farming, but equally in the garden, to leave the soil as undisturbed as possible, even when you’re growing vegetables, which I know is tricky for some people. But to keep that soil intact, to keep the soil life intact around our plants, to build the organic matter — so to mulch, to add material to the top of the soil, and that will protect the soil from the extremes of weather, from the sun, will help absorb water, will keep the soil cooler. And if it’s organic it’s going to be helping in sequestration of carbon, which is all going to help with climate change as well.
So soil health, absolutely key. And if you can get that right, then you’ll find that your plants are more resilient. It’s when they get stressed, they run out of water, maybe the pest comes along and that’s a second stress — that’s when they’re more vulnerable to climate change and the heat or the wet. So keep that soil healthy, undisturbed, lots of soil life, lots of earthworms, and you’re halfway there, I think, to having healthy plants that are in a better position to cope with what the weather throws at them.
Ross Kenyon: So I just need to go out and start planting olive trees and fig trees right away? There are some intermediate steps that may be advisable?
Sally Morgan: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I do have an olive tree, but I have to watch the frost. I mean, very few of those Mediterranean plants are frost hardy, and so you might get away with it two or three years out of five. But then the nature of climate change is that it’s going to throw the unexpected at you. So you could easily — we had a very late frost back in February. After Seattle, I’d popped down to Atlanta, and I was down on the coast at Charleston and Savannah, and they had part of that big heavy frost, and they were looking at all of their hardy tropical planting down there, and the camellias had all been hit by the frost, which was totally unexpected. They hadn’t had that for years.
But you’ll get these quirky, anomalous meteorological events where that big pressure from the Arctic moved across North America, and it went down as far as Georgia and delivered, you know, days of frost. And so we could easily get trapped into thinking, oh, we’ve got a lovely Mediterranean climate, isn’t it gorgeous? And then, you know, it hits us in April or May or something with a really unseasonable cold frost. And we had minus 10 here, which we shouldn’t have done. I’m in a zone 8 to 9, so we really shouldn’t have had that degree of frost, but we did, and we had it for five or six days, where the damage was done because of the length of time. And it followed a very wet, mild period, so my plants hadn’t toughened up much, and then it was really extreme for them in the cold. So that’s what we’re dealing with at the moment, in this transition period. We’re not quite sure what to expect, so resilience and resilient plants are the answer, for me anyway.
Ross Kenyon: Have you thought much about the intersection of animal agriculture? I keep chickens. I aspirationally would like to keep bees at some point. How might this make one’s garden more resilient, or does it have less effect?
Sally Morgan: Oh, I know, I’m sure that, you know, for me, I have ducks wandering around my garden. They are very small ones, miniature ducks, and they’re very good at slug patrol, so I don’t mind that, and they do leave a few droppings and things. So I think there’s lots to learn from farming. Actually, a lot of the stuff that’s in our book comes from my experience in organic farming in the UK. I own an organic farm, a hundred acres, mostly grassland farm, which I’m not doing too much to at the moment. I am, sort of in a way, you know, rewilding it, and we just take grass. And I learn a lot from growers and farmers who are trying to do this for a living, and there’s a big overlap between what they’re doing and what I can do.
And I’m picking it up from the diversity in the crops and things. I’m doing away slightly with crop rotations in my vegetable area, because I don’t think that’s the right answer necessarily. And I do think, you know, to bring livestock in, to have the chickens wandering around, or my ducks and my turkeys, it’s not just pleasant and relaxing, but they have a benefit as well. So there’s lots to learn from some of the more innovative growers and farmers that we can apply in our gardens.
Ross Kenyon: Is crop rotation perhaps just less useful at that small scale? Is it hard to tell the difference in the soil quality season after season?
Sally Morgan: I think it does. I have been looking to the East, and to Korean natural gardening and Japanese styles of natural agriculture, where they don’t disturb the soil for years on end, and they grow the same crops year in, year out, and they see their soil improve and they see their crop yields improve. But I think for me, with growing vegetables, I’m not about the yield, and this is what worries me to a certain extent — it’s all about productivity. And for me as a gardener it’s about health and healthy plants. But with a crop rotation I get a bit confused now, because when I look at soil health, I am trying to build soil life and I’m trying to not disturb it, and I’m trying to get a good relationship between the plants and the soil and the soil life.
So there is this lovely, mutual relationship, but if I’m going to pull them up every year and grow something different in their place, then those relationships are going to have to rebuild. So I can’t quite get my head around why that is a benefit, other than perhaps if there’s a pest problem. But I don’t tend to have too many pest problems, because again, I’m pretty relaxed and I like natural predators, and I don’t freak out and get the chemicals out as soon as I see a pest in the garden. So I think for me my rotation is quite relaxed, and I do what we call a polyculture approach, which is to mix and match all the different crops, which I know is not applicable on a much larger scale, if I was market gardening or growing vegetables on field scale. But for me I can mix and match.
So a row of carrots, a row of beetroots, a row of onions, lots and lots of flowers to bring in the predators and the pollinators. In a small space I have diversity. And we go back to that word again — for me, resilience is diversity. And increasingly amongst organic farmers in the UK, they are mixing up their crops, they’re using cover crops and they’re using flowers to bring in the predators, and so they too are beginning to do that, but on a much larger scale, and to improve their soils by not digging. So I think the no-till movement is really enlarging, and there is some evidence now to show that it does sequester more carbon and it locks it up in the soil. And as soon as you put your fork in and you turn that soil, that organic matter is exposed and it can oxidise and it goes back out again.
So for me and climate change, to leave my soils as undisturbed as possible and to keep them covered. And I quite like living mulch, as I like covers. I like weeds, and I like to keep my soil covered by something all winter, be it a weed or a crop, so that that soil is continually being fed by a living root. So we go back to those roots, the soil, the soil life, and those living roots are feeding my soil over winter. And then I will finish off that crop, maybe kill them off with a piece of plastic, cover it over, or weed them out or hoe them off, or just live with them in some cases. So, yeah, I’m a bit relaxed in my gardening. I like the relaxed approach.
Ross Kenyon: One of the early books I read was Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution, the Japanese permaculture — a strong focus on, he calls it lazy man’s farming or something like that in there, but very much akin to the chop and drop and let stuff cover the soil. Gardening has an image, perhaps, of being a fussy discipline, of one where there’s order imposed upon things, there’s an unnatural cleanliness that is trying to be forced upon nature, and I’m not sure how gardening got like that, but it’s nice to see some pushback. Do you have any idea, the origin of that cultivation style?
Sally Morgan: I suspect it was the good old Victorians [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: Okay.
Sally Morgan: And I think, if you look further back in history — if I look back to our Elizabethan age, 15th, 16th century, you know, cottage gardening, they grew to eat, and they would have all sorts of medicinal plants in their gardens as well as edibles. And then I think you get this orderly approach in the walled gardens of the Victorian era, so 1820s onwards. And you see that in some of the biggest estates in New England and Virginia, where some of the, you know, typical walled gardens, we have orderly rows of vegetables. And I think, you know, when you’re picking vegetables for large numbers of people and you’re selling them, orderly is quite good, because you can harvest them quite quickly.
But I think that approach to tidy gardens and neat lawns and everything pruned within an inch of its life is very Victorian, and then very sort of uptight sort of interwar years and things. But actually, I was quite relieved — I went to Chelsea Flower Show yesterday, and there we were seeing lots of recycled concrete aggregate and things in the garden, less soil, quite a lot of weeds, which was lovely. And I get hung up on this idea of, why is that plant a weed? Because you don’t like it, it’s not supposed to be there? But who made that decision originally, that that plant’s a weed? But that plant’s really nice, and we’re going to grow that. So I quite like dandelions and things. I mean, nettles have a use, so many weeds are medicinal.
Yeah, how do you know they’re there? They bring diversity. And for me, when I look at floral diversity in my garden, you know, weeds contribute so much to that diversity, particularly at the beginning and the end of the growing season, and I want something for those pollinators to find when they come into my garden. And so to have those, if any weeds, little tiny weeds, which are so easy to pull up if you don’t want them, but just leave them there if they’re not doing any harm. Yeah, I hope we are moving away from this neat and tidy bare soil approach, and that we’re going to keep everything a bit more covered and relaxed and in connection with each other. Because I think, with a living cover, living mulch over the soil, all those plants are in connection, which is great. Lovely communities are developing, which makes them more resilient. So the messy gardeners are the ones which are going to win out when it comes to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: It seems partly a factor of scale, where you talk about plantation and cash cropping as an ideology or farming style. And I think this applies pretty neatly to how urban areas use trees. As you mentioned, there was some statistic in your book about how Helsinki is something like 50% linden trees and is quite vulnerable to a pest that would target that tree, that may, that will likely arrive at some point. It’s very easy for a city, I’m sure, to manage, and to specialise in a small set of trees, a small number of species, to manage. And you imagine a city — I’m not sure cities are that good at managing things in general, but if they also had to get good at knowing hundreds or thousands of species in a messy gardening style, would this be manageable from an administrative point of view?
Sally Morgan: I think it starts with the training. I think it comes to that mindset that a lot of the traditional city landscapers and people that have been trained 30 years, twenty, thirty, forty years ago, come through this sort of mindset of pruning, mowing, using power tools, using lots of chemicals, keep everything neat and tidy, nobody wants any weeds on the walkways and things. But I think the new generation — the hope, the new generation of horticulturalists who are going to move into landscaping and maintenance and things — maybe have a little bit more open-minded approach, and that will understand that they need this diversity and they need this flexibility in spaces.
But increasingly now, we are seeing that we need the ecology in our cities, and we also need the ecology in terms of rain gardens in cities. So when we have heavy rain events, we need these temporary areas where the water can collect, where we have vegetation. And again, Washington’s quite good about having rain gardens that take that overflow from the hard surfaces of the city. Chicago’s quite good. You’re seeing it increasingly in London and cities now, where we have those areas of vegetation that can take that excess water, and there they need a variety of lots of different plants and lots of different trees, so it may come from that.
And then I would love to see cities that would have more fruit trees, more edible plants for everybody to benefit from. We have schemes over here, Incredible Edible, which are community schemes where they grow vegetables and fruit trees in open areas, in urban areas, on the side of pavements, in small parks, in corners of derelict land, where they grow things that the community can actually help themselves to. And I think the new generations of people coming through, I really hope they will feel that they want green cities. They will need those trees for transpiration and cooling on those busy days, hot days in summer that we’ve got to come, and that they want more greenery around them for their wellbeing and their health, as well as to feed them and to improve the environment.
So I’m quite hopeful that some of our — at least over here — some of our more innovative young landscape designers who are really into urban corners which are green and edible. So I think it can only get better, because I think we’re in a really low spot at the moment. So I really hope it’s going to get better.
Ross Kenyon: I love local foraging in Seattle, because there’s so many fruit trees. But the etiquette, I think, is the main blocker to it being adopted, because it’s unclear. I only know that it’s safe to take someone’s fruit if there’s a huge pile of it on the ground underneath the tree. I’m saying, okay, I like dogwood fruit, I know Koreans make wine out of it, I like eating it fresh, I would like to experiment with it, and it’s unlikely — but I also have a neighbour who has persimmons, and I’m just waiting for these persimmons to get picked. I don’t have it. Can I take them? Do I need to knock on the door? We don’t have a culture where — I mean, that’s what usufruct means, like, go back to Roman law, the use of fruit: if it’s not going to be used, it’s fair game for anyone to take. But I’m not sure that would go over well in Seattle, which is a famously persnickety place, maybe quite passive-aggressive, would post online about someone stealing their fruit that would otherwise go in the garbage can. I think that might be the main hang-up. What it’s like for you? But that’s what it’s like here.
Sally Morgan: We go whinging and moaning about fruit on the pavement making a mess, rats. Yeah, makes a mess, and it gets slippery, and therefore there might be some public liability, people slip over on the site, so [unclear] because of the fruit. So there’s always going to be an excuse, which is such a shame. But yeah, I don’t know. I mean, over here we get people who are quite good at putting boxes out for people to help themselves.
Ross Kenyon: Nice idea. I think we always think that if it drops on the sidewalk, it’s fair game. You know, if you wanted it, you should’ve been out there and got it before other people picked it off of the ground. But I think if we had more of that going on, it would become second nature, and we would know — it’s a bit like the wild foraging — that you never take everything, you always make sure it’s a sustainable harvest.
Sally Morgan: And it would be wonderful — walking around, and certainly if you see a load of apples, you have an apple. I mean, we have so much space in our cities to be able to do that community thing. And it all helps: those trees are going to help cool the city with the transpiration, so it’s lots of wins. And their roots are going to hold the water and stop us from flooding. So we really need those trees in our cities, and the understory of shrubs and things, and little corners that have got greenery that’s going to hold those flood waters back for us. I mean, it’s all there for us to employ. I just hope we do it sooner rather than later.
Ross Kenyon: Seattle’s had a lot of back and forth on this too — not to make the show too Seattle-centric — but as neighbourhoods have been getting upzoned and they’re becoming more dense, there’s also been conflict with which kinds of trees can be planted and how big they can be. And in some cases some neighbourhoods, in my understanding, are allowing for many fewer trees, and some trees are being cut down in favour of density. So there, in some ways, at least for here, there’s a tension between the affordability and growth in density, and then on the other hand, greenery. Must there be some conflict? This is probably beyond the scope of your expertise, maybe, but would you have any thoughts on that?
Sally Morgan: Right. I was wandering around, you know, London yesterday, and I was actually taking photos of what I would consider to be sick trees. And I was sort of thinking, you know, looking at this mature tree, it doesn’t look very well, and I think, how can you get this new tree established in this place? Because this tree’s probably been here for 50, 60 years. Its roots expanded before the pavements arrived, before the cars got so dense, before our air pollution kicked in. And I just find it quite difficult to visualise how those trees are going to get established, which is why we come back to this lack of diversity in our urban trees, because the landscapers know that only a certain range of species can cope with air pollution, compacted soil, people bashing against them, tying up their bikes beside them, dogs peeing on them.
You know, all of that type of stuff — you need quite a resilient tree to cope with that. And how do you get those trees, these tiny little saplings, up to these lovely mature specimens that we’re losing at the moment? And that really worries me, because if we were to lose — and I just wandered around Parliament Square, looking at very sick trees — I think that will look completely different, and it’s never going to look the same again for another 50, 60 years. Which, that’s what worries me about trees, and the slow nature of their growth, and we’re really changing our landscape, unfortunately, through our actions.
Ross Kenyon: You’re going to have to do a campaign around the Royal Oak that Charles the Second hid up in. And I mean, there’s probably a thousand pubs named The Royal Oak in the UK, so I feel like that’s probably the place to start.
Sally Morgan: Yeah, we do have quite a lot of community planting schemes and things. It’s getting those trees through those early years, because much as we plant lots and lots of trees, and everybody wants to plant a tree nowadays — and I don’t think Americans are any different — there’s lots of schemes whereby, you know, you do this for us and we’ll plant a tree for you. Well, that’s the easy bit. What is more concerning is how many of those new trees actually get looked after, and how many are going to survive through the next 10 years, to where they get to a point that they can get away and start sequestering carbon.
And that really annoys me, these sort of superficial ideas that planting these little saplings is really going to help. And it’s the same in cities — you know, we need to sort of have communities looking out for those trees, and having stewardship and ownership of those trees, and to encourage and ensure that they do survive those early years, and that the existing trees are looked after. And it’s difficult. But you know, when we look at the layout, the architecture of a city street, and I see the tarmac all the way up to the trees, you’re thinking, why couldn’t you leave an area around them, or use some of these special tree guards and things, to keep people away from the tree and to allow the water to drain around the roots rather than running off into the road, and things like that? So there’s lots of little things we could do, I’m sure, which would make a world of difference. And it just needs these people to actually think.
Ross Kenyon: I think the one-and-done solution mindset is really attractive, and it’s hard to get out of. Even what you just said took 15 times as long to explain as just plant saplings and lots of them. The idea that you would have to do continuous monitoring and stewardship to make sure your one-and-done solution was carried out — people have already moved on to the next thing. They don’t necessarily have the attention span for it, I think.
Sally Morgan: No, you’re spot on. I’m not, you know, it’s too easy, isn’t it? Let’s all turn up at a community session and we get our spades out and we plant lots of trees, tick, tick. And I think a lot of the larger corporates are to blame for this as well, because they have so many schemes, they’re buying the, you know — in this country we’re actually running out of trees to plant, they have been so successful. But I’d love to know what the percentage of success was for all of those trees. I suspect it’s quite low. So, unfortunately, and too many of those trees are then surrounded by plastic guards, which have their own problem.
Ross Kenyon: What will happen to places that are currently Mediterranean under climate change, with regard to plant growth, horticulture, etc.?
Sally Morgan: Whoa, that is a very good question, isn’t it? That is really quite worrying. I’ve got family who live in Spain, and for a lot of North Europe, that is the area where they do a lot of the salad vegetable growing because of the Mediterranean climate. But their water is retreating, their reservoirs this year are quite low, the temperatures are already as high as the seasonal highs would be back in April and May, so they are getting warmer earlier. They’ve got new pests, they’ve got mosquitoes arriving from North Africa, so it is worrying. I think they will have more of a North African climate, and they’re going to have to adjust. And it’s difficult when you support millions of visitors in the way of tourists in summer, and you also want water for irrigation of crops.
And then I suspect those countries that are growing crops for other people might go, well, actually, we need those crops for ourselves now, because some of our other crops have failed. So maybe they won’t export as many crops to North Europe to supply us with standard veg. And we had shortages in the shops in the last six months here — we had shortages of lettuce, which upset lots of people. They couldn’t have their salad for lunch. And it was all to do with some very unseasonal storms in Spain which wiped out some crops, quite a lot of crops, and it took them obviously another two months to get to that point where they would be harvesting the salad crops.
So again, I think with drought and extreme winter weather, it makes those types of crops far more vulnerable. And if their reservoirs dry up and their soil contains less water, they won’t be as productive, and they’re going to have to adapt, and they will lose large areas of what is productive farmland. Now, I don’t know how much they can do about it.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know if you’ve seen much about this season in California, but — you have seen it — the snowpack. There’s a lake that hasn’t existed in the San Joaquin Valley for a very long time that has re-emerged due to all the new water. Obviously wildfires threaten many, many urban areas, especially in the foothills, and even in metropolitan LA. I don’t know what a lot of these areas are going to be like if they get drier but also just lots of precipitation. They face both simultaneously. That sounds like too much to manage.
Sally Morgan: It’s really — I think that is what climate change is all about, these extremes. You’re going to get a couple of good years, and then all of a sudden, you know, you’ve got your mega drought, and then you get your huge amount of water.
Ross Kenyon: But apparently, even the amount of water they have had this year, it’s still not enough to replenish the aquifers. And is it, is it Lake Mead and Lake Powell still pretty low levels? Isn’t it finding bodies from old gangster days?
Sally Morgan: I mean, it is worrying, with the population increases in many areas where they can’t support that number of people with the water. It is going to cause migration, and that is the biggest threat, I think, of our times, as huge areas of countryside become untenable for growing and farming and forestry, with more wildfires and more extreme droughts. And it’s the extremes, because we’re not there yet. I think we could, if the weather started levelling out, if the carbon dioxide level started levelling out, then the climate will start to settle. But we’re not in that yet, we’re still creeping up, and that is what climate change is about, unfortunately, isn’t it? Plus 2, plus 3 degrees C. So that has big implications for growing across the country.
And it’s one of the units I teach on, on an RHS, or Royal Horticultural Society, agriculture, horticulture course: the implications of climate change to food and farming and our health and things like that. But food and farming is difficult. I’ve no answer, unfortunately. I don’t think any of us do. It’s having to change practices, and looking back — the only good possible way is to look back to history, to see how some of those indigenous peoples in the past have dealt with growing with very little water and how they harvested. They have some lovely ways, the waffle gardens and things, and how they trapped water when it did come and kept it in the ground for as long as possible. So maybe we do need to look back into history, way back, not just Victorian history but before that, and learn what indigenous peoples could do in drier times where they have been in the past, and how they can cope. But on a larger scale, it’s quite difficult, unfortunately.
Ross Kenyon: Do you see gardening moving the needle in some large way, or do you see this as more of a way to educate and get people to think about larger macro issues, potentially beyond their control?
Sally Morgan: I think it’s all of those, actually. I know over here we have obviously a very keen gardening population, and there is more area of our country under garden than there is under nature reserves, under national parks. So I think we have a big role to play as gardeners in the conservation of many of our species and improving biodiversity. And I do think that gardening, particularly having food at schools, in school schemes, is a very nice introduction to people about being more self-sufficient and growing food, to understand where our food comes from. So I think gardening has a very important role to teach young people, as well as to sequester more carbon in our small plots.
If everybody looked after their plots organically and helped our diversity and harvested water and did something in terms of building soil carbon, then we’re all actually contributing to the big effect. But we’re also learning how to live a more sustainable lifestyle on the small scale in our garden. So I think it’s both ways: on a larger scale and also on a small scale, about teaching next generations, and having more responsibility for our actions.
Ross Kenyon: You came very close to quoting Candide — one must cultivate one’s own garden — and so maybe that’s a nice place to put a little cap on it, with some Voltaire. Is that okay with you?
Sally Morgan: Yeah, absolutely.
Ross Kenyon: Sally, this book is great. If you’re listening to the show, you probably already garden, or you would if you had the space to do so. Really useful book, definitely made me think. I was really attracted to the [unclear] section, by the way. I also would like to have ducks. I’ve seen the running ducks — Instagram knows I want running ducks somehow, and they’re very, very cute. Thanks for writing something like this, though. I think it’s a great resource.
Sally Morgan: Thank you very much. I’m glad you enjoyed it, and check my Instagram out if you want to see my ducks.
Ross Kenyon: Yes, yeah, I will be doing that. Actually, [unclear] — sorry, my slug hunters. Slug hunters are famously useful for that. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com, follow us on social media, and we will catch you next time.
