Plants Hit By Severe Winter Weather

Tue, 17 Feb 2009

More than half the plants in some National Trust gardens have been badly hit by the harsh winter weather, according to the charity .

Mediterranean and southern hemisphere plants are normally able to grow during December and January due to South-west England’s usually mild-climate.

However, the coldest January in Devon and Cornwall for more than a decade has damaged many of the trust’s "tender species".

Volunteers, who examined 14 National Trust estates, also found that frost and snow had delayed the early blooming of spring flowers .

They revealed that a third of the plants have been lost or damaged at the sub-tropical Glendurgan gardens, near Falmouth, with succulents, tree ferns and fuschias suffering the worst.

Around 60 per cent of the garden at the Knightshayes site in Devon has been affected by the weight of snow on the plants, including a magnolia tree which split in half.

The trust said that while the number of plants currently flowering is less than half the amount from the same time last year, it remains optimistic that the gardens will make a full recovery over time.
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