The Met Office has issued this stark warning to the UK’s gardeners.

Guy Barter, who oversees the RHS’s advisory service, suggested that lawns will become untenable in parts of southern England. The amount of water required to maintain the traditional green english lawn is unlikely to fall as summer rainfall declines and high temperatures producing drought become more common over the next 5o years.

And lawns are not the only thing in the garden facing new challenges:

“If you are planting long-lived plants like trees then you might want to choose a species that can cope with hotter, drier, summers and warmer, wetter, winters,” said Vicky Pope, the Met Office’s head of climate change. The decision to take the message to gardeners reflects concern among researchers that the public has still not understood the threat of climate change in their gardens.

She suggested that  the  2003  heatwave, which was blamed for 35,000 deaths across Europe, could be regarded as cool by 2060. Such warnings are backed by a survey from the Waste and Resources Action Programme, in which 56% of gardeners reported a longer season for grass cutting.

Preserving our lawns is not going to be an easy task and we need to explore new ways of adapting them to climate change.