Is climate change uprooting the traditional garden?

Is climate change uprooting the traditional garden?

The sun is out, it's a brisk spring afternoon, and the garden centre is buzzing. Lining the aisles are various types of shrubs, flowers, herbs and more.

Typical for this time of year, people are bringing their outdoor spaces to life with the pinks, yellows and other vibrant colours of nature.

But gone are the days when getting your green thumb working was as straightforward as buying a case of geraniums and getting into the garden. In the face of climate change, gardeners — and those who supply them — are having to put more thought into how they beautify their spaces.


Laura Dohney, store manager at Hunters Garden Centre in Vancouver, said recent years have brought an array of weather patterns. From heat domes to downpours, cold snaps to deep freezes and everything in between, B.C. has been faced with the harsh reality of climate change at work.

Despite an increase in more drought-tolerant plants, garden centres say they're still seeing a lot of demand for flowering plants and popular annuals. (Hana Mae Nassar/CBC)

"The common theme is with the extremes that we've been getting … plants aren't surviving. I think that's really where it comes down to," Dohney said.

It's not just flowering plants that are dying; she said many customers come in saying trees — some decades old — and shrubs have been killed off or are showing signs of extreme damage.

Barb Fraser and Dennis Henderson are some of those customers.

"We have found that we've had to adapt our thinking," said Fraser, a longtime resident of Vancouver.

Longtime Vancouver residents Dennis Henderson and Barb Fraser say climate change is something they've been thinking a lot about when it comes to their garden. They've incorporated more hardy plants into their gardens. (Hana Mae Nassar/CBC)

She said they try to look for plants that will survive cold snaps and high heat, and have landed on some favourites like the boxwood shrub and rhododendrons.

But not all plants — even some typically considered hardy — are immune to the drastic ups and downs of climate change.
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A 'new normal'

The province has seen large-scale impacts of deep freezes in recent years. In 2023, a mid-January cold snap dealt a severe blow to B.C.'s wine industry, with catastrophic crop loss across the Okanagan Valley. Also in the region, farms were devastated by the cold a year later, with extreme temperatures damaging stone-fruit trees and even more grape vines, killing off delicate buds.

Andrea Bellamy, business development manager at Figaro's Garden in East Vancouver, said the cold didn't discriminate — all sorts of plants struggled.

"Rhododendrons, for example, are a super hardy plant, but because we had such a mild winter followed by such an intense cold snap, people got severe damage on their rhodos and their sarcocas and all kinds of like really tough plants," she explained.

Andrea Bellamy, who's been with Figaro's since 2022, says she's seen more and more people come to the garden centre with climate change on the mind. (Hana Mae Nassar/CBC)


"What we thought we knew about gardening may no longer be true. We've had to re-examine everything in the face of this weird weather we're having."

It's not that plants aren't resilient, Dohney said, it's that they can't adapt to the changes as quickly as they have been happening.

"When things drastically go from one extreme to the other in a very short period of time, like a couple of years, they can't adapt to that. If they adapted very slowly over 10 to 25 years, they'd be fine," she explained.

Conifers and other hardy plants have become more popular among customers, according to Bellamy at Figaro's Garden in East Vancouver. (Hana Mae Nassar/CBC)

Bellamy said mindfulness around climate change and the fact that people are becoming less and less willing to "take risks" on less-hardy plants has become somewhat of a "new normal."

The twinberry honeysuckle is a plant found commonly in parts of B.C. (Hana Mae Nassar/CBC)
Going back to 'old standards'

There's been an uptick in people looking to get back to basics, the garden experts said. Those basics: native B.C. plants.

"If they're good to grow in the Okanagan, they're going to be fine to grow [in Vancouver] because they can handle the extremes. So we're just segueing back into what I would call the old standards — plants that have been around for a long time that have really shown that they can manage to make it through things," she said.

Bellamy with Figaro's Garden says plants like the western sword fern are native to B.C. and can be a good option for those looking for more drought-tolerant options. (Hana Mae Nassar/CBC)

Even the City of Vancouver is embracing more native plants, adding them to areas like the St. George Rainway, a streetside garden project designed to capture and filter contaminants from rainwater.
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The big emphasis on buying local also comes at a time Canadians are making a concerted effort to support businesses on this side of the border, amid U.S. trade tensions and tariffs.

Gardening centres like Figaro's have reported an increase in people wanting to grow their own herbs. (Hana Mae Nassar/CBC)

It's even encouraged more people to try their hand at growing their own food.

"It seems like seeds are moving more quickly than they have in the past few years. I guess that speaks to the local … reducing-your-carbon-footprint kind of angle, too," said Bellamy.

Flowering plants like geraniums don't just provide pops of colour in your garden. Experts say they help draw pollinators like bees, which are in need of a helping hand. (Hana Mae Nassar/CBC)


Regardless of the challenges climate change has brought, gardeners and experts CBC News spoke with show an eagerness in continuing to roll up their sleeves.

After all, flowers serve an important purpose.

Aside from being important for pollinators, some people plant flowers to bring lightness and "instant joy," said Bellamy.

"I think annuals are still popular for that reason to create that, like, instant impact," she said. "We're still looking for ways to bring joy into an otherwise kind of scary world, right? [Climate change is] not deterring everybody."

Plants with thinner leaves and petals don't tend to fare as well in hotter weather, Dohney says. However, she points out they still serve an important purpose, such as drawing in bees. (Hana Mae Nassar/CBC)