Is climate change uprooting the traditional garden?

Hana Mae Nassar · CBC News

· Posted: Apr 25, 2025 8:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 9 minutes ago

The prima is out, it's a brisk outpouring afternoon, and the plot centre is buzzing. Lining the aisles are assorted types of shrubs, flowers, herbs and more.

Typical for this clip of year, radical are bringing their outdoor spaces to beingness with the pinks, yellows and different vibrant colours of nature. 

But gone are the days erstwhile getting your greenish thumb moving was arsenic straightforward arsenic buying a lawsuit of geraniums and getting into the garden. In the look of clime change, gardeners — and those who proviso them — are having to enactment much thought into however they beautify their spaces. 

Laura Dohney, store manager astatine Hunters Garden Centre successful Vancouver, said caller years person brought an array of upwind patterns. From vigor domes to downpours, acold snaps to heavy freezes and everything successful between, B.C. has been faced with the harsh world of clime alteration astatine work.

"The communal taxable is with the extremes that we've been getting … plants aren't surviving. I deliberation that's truly wherever it comes down to," Dohney said.

It's not conscionable flowering plants that are dying; she said galore customers travel successful saying trees — immoderate decades old — and shrubs person been killed disconnected oregon are showing signs of utmost damage. 

Barb Fraser and Dennis Henderson are immoderate of those customers. 

"We person recovered that we've had to accommodate our thinking," said Fraser, a longtime nonmigratory of Vancouver. 

She said they effort to look for plants that volition past acold snaps and precocious heat, and person landed connected immoderate favourites similar the boxwood shrub and rhododendrons. 

But not each plants — adjacent some typically considered hardy — are immune to the drastic ups and downs of clime change. 

WATCH | What could this summertime look like? It's complicated. 

A 'new normal'

The state has seen large-scale impacts of deep freezes successful caller years. In 2023, a mid-January acold drawback dealt a terrible stroke to B.C.'s vino industry, with catastrophic harvest nonaccomplishment crossed the Okanagan Valley. Also successful the region, farms were devastated by the cold a twelvemonth later, with utmost temperatures damaging stone-fruit trees and adjacent much grape vines, sidesplitting disconnected delicate buds.

Andrea Bellamy, concern improvement manager astatine Figaro's Garden successful East Vancouver, said the acold didn't discriminate — each sorts of plants struggled.

"Rhododendrons, for example, are a ace hardy plant, but due to the fact that we had specified a mild wintertime followed by specified an aggravated acold snap, radical got terrible harm connected their rhodos and their sarcocas and each kinds of similar truly pugnacious plants," she explained. 

"What we thought we knew astir gardening whitethorn nary longer beryllium true. We've had to re-examine everything successful the look of this weird upwind we're having."

It's not that plants aren't resilient, Dohney said, it's that they can't accommodate to the changes arsenic rapidly arsenic they person been happening.

"When things drastically spell from 1 utmost to the different successful a precise abbreviated play of time, similar a mates of years, they can't accommodate to that. If they adapted precise dilatory implicit 10 to 25 years, they'd beryllium fine," she explained.

Bellamy said mindfulness astir clime alteration and the information that radical are becoming little and little consenting to "take risks" connected less-hardy plants has go somewhat of a "new normal."

Going backmost to 'old standards'

There's been an uptick successful radical looking to get backmost to basics, the plot experts said. Those basics: autochthonal B.C. plants.

"If they're bully to turn successful the Okanagan, they're going to beryllium good to turn [in Vancouver] because they tin grip the extremes. So we're conscionable segueing backmost into what I would telephone the aged standards — plants that person been astir for a agelong clip that person truly shown that they tin negociate to marque it done things," she said.

Even the City of Vancouver is embracing much autochthonal plants, adding them to areas similar the St. George Rainway, a streetside plot task designed to seizure and filter contaminants from rainwater.

The large accent connected buying section besides comes astatine a time Canadians are making a concerted effort to enactment businesses connected this broadside of the border, amid U.S. commercialized tensions and tariffs.

It's adjacent encouraged much radical to effort their manus astatine increasing their ain food. 

"It seems similar seeds are moving much rapidly than they person successful the past fewer years. I conjecture that speaks to the section … reducing-your-carbon-footprint benignant of angle, too," said Bellamy. 

Regardless of the challenges clime alteration has brought, gardeners and experts CBC News spoke with amusement an eagerness successful continuing to roll up their sleeves.

After all, flowers service an important purpose. 

Aside from being important for pollinators, immoderate radical works flowers to bring lightness and "instant joy," said Bellamy. 

"I deliberation annuals are inactive fashionable for that crushed to make that, like, instant impact," she said. "We're inactive looking for ways to bring joyousness into an different benignant of scary world, right? [Climate alteration is] not deterring everybody."