The 2026 growing season delivers a brutal sequence of cold, heat and drought that horticulturists say may become the new normal
Gardeners across Britain are confronting a season of unprecedented disappointment this year as a chaotic swing between extreme weather events has left flower borders threadbare, forced the cancellation of beloved sunflower festivals, and pushed the horticultural industry into crisis mode. The culprit is not a single frost or pest but a relentless sequence of wet cold, record-breaking heat and deepening drought that has disrupted plant growth from Suffolk to Pennsylvania.
The year began with one of the wettest starts in more than a century across parts of the United Kingdom, leaving soils waterlogged and delaying seed germination. Then, with almost no transitional spring, an extraordinary early heatwave struck in late May, sending temperatures at Kew Gardens to 35.1°C on 26 May—shattering the 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 the second ever issued in UK history—was in force for three consecutive days as temperatures approached 40°C.
Plants Skip Growth Stages Under Dual Stress
For horticulturists, the timing proved catastrophic. Seeds and seedlings that struggled to establish roots in cold, sodden soil were abruptly forced to cope with drought stress and scorching heat before they had developed the root systems needed for survival. The Royal Horticultural Society described the effect as plants “skipping” stages of growth entirely—rushing to flower and set seed prematurely, or simply failing to bloom at all.
The RHS, which manages five major public gardens across England, has acknowledged that this is no longer an isolated event. The organization has committed to emergency water-management projects through 2026, including rainwater storage tanks, “ebb and flow” irrigation benches, rain gardens, and public education campaigns urging home gardeners to adopt similar measures. It marks a striking shift for an institution built on the ideal of the reliably beautiful English garden; the RHS is now planning for water scarcity as a permanent condition.
Sunflower Fields Close, Hosepipe Bans Multiply
The human cost of the disrupted season was visible across the countryside. In Suffolk, the organizers of Horringer Sunflower Field near Bury St Edmunds announced they would not open for 2026, citing fields too large to irrigate and weeks of failed hopes for rain. “We are absolutely gutted,” the organizers said, “but we are hopeful for 2027.” Suffolk was then under a hosepipe ban after three successive heatwaves left the ground too dry to sustain the crop. Smaller sunflower patches elsewhere reported similar failures, with seeds that never germinated due to cold snaps in early May followed by soil too parched to recover.
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 imposing bans—several for the first time in decades. Gardeners have been advised to rely on water butts, greywater from baths and washing-up bowls, and mulching to retain soil moisture.
Garden Centres See Sales Plummet
The economic toll has been equally stark. Trade body figures showed garden centre visits down approximately 2% in June compared with the same month in 2025, with gardening sales falling as much as 13% against 2024 benchmarks. The pattern mirrored broader high street struggles: British Retail Consortium data recorded UK-wide footfall down 3.4% year-on-year in June, with high streets seeing the sharpest drop of 6.2% as record heat and red weather warnings kept shoppers indoors or drove them online. Industry analysts identified a deeper structural problem: wet springs delay planting and depress early-season sales, then sudden heat spikes create a rush for irrigation equipment and shade plants that arrives too late for garden centres to restock.
Global Disruption Extends Beyond Britain
The crisis is not limited 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 soils, rivers and reservoirs from France to Hungary. Wildfires forced mass evacuations in France’s Gironde region and burned more than 100,000 hectares in Spain alone, while the Po River in northern Italy ran 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 £1 billion in lost working hours in the UK.
In the United States, forecasters have pointed to an emerging El Niño pattern and an expanding drought footprint covering most of the lower 48 states. Gardening advice columns are steering growers toward heat-tolerant flowers such as zinnias, cosmos, coneflowers and lantana over thirstier traditional bedding plants. In Pennsylvania, a long-running sunflower festival was scrapped entirely after drought combined with deer damage wiped out the crop before it could bloom. Japan is forecast to see another summer of above-normal temperatures nationwide, with the meteorological agency warning of knock-on effects for crop growth.
A Hardening Pattern Demands New Strategies
What emerges from this season 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 means 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 photograph among the sunflowers this July, in Suffolk or Pennsylvania alike, it has meant a summer of empty fields where the flowers were supposed to be.