How Public Gardens Can Lead the Response to Climate Change

There is a tendency, when discussing climate change and gardens, to frame public gardens primarily as victims — places under threat from drought, from shifting pest and disease pressure, from the gradual unsuitability of plants that have defined their character for generations. That framing is not wrong. The threats are real, and the challenges facing the managers of Britain's great garden collections are significant and growing.

But it is an incomplete picture. Public gardens are not simply passive recipients of climate change. They are — or could be — active agents in shaping how communities understand, experience, and respond to it. They have the expertise, the public presence, the physical reality of living plants, and the deep community relationships to play a role in the climate conversation that no other kind of institution can quite replicate. The question is whether they will choose to inhabit that role with the ambition it deserves.

I want to make the case that they should — and that the tools for doing so are already, largely, in their possession.

What makes public gardens uniquely positioned

Public gardens occupy a distinctive place in the landscape of British cultural and civic life. They are places that people visit not out of obligation but out of desire — drawn by beauty, by curiosity, by the pleasure of being among plants and in well-managed outdoor space. That voluntary, pleasure-motivated engagement is rare and valuable. It creates a receptiveness that museums, classrooms, and community meetings cannot always generate.

At the same time, public gardens are working horticultural systems — places where the consequences of climate change are visible, tangible, and immediate in ways that abstract data and policy discussions are not. A beech tree losing its leaves early in a dry summer. A rhododendron collection threatened by Phytophthora spreading in warmer, wetter winters. A wildflower meadow responding differently from one season to the next as rainfall patterns shift. These are not illustrations of climate change — they are climate change, made visible and real in a form that anyone can observe and understand.

This combination — willing audiences and tangible horticultural reality — gives public gardens a communicative power that is genuinely unusual. They can show people what is happening to the living world in a way that is immediate, emotionally engaging, and grounded in direct experience rather than abstraction.

The community engagement opportunity

The most compelling model I have encountered for how public gardens can activate this potential comes from the Chicago Botanic Garden, whose community engagement programme invited members of the public to collect phenology data — recording the timing of biological events such as first flowering, leaf emergence, and fruiting across the garden's plant collections. The data gathered had genuine scientific value, contributing to a long-term record of how plants are responding to changing conditions. But the process of gathering it did something equally important: it created a community of people who were actively observing, thinking about, and personally invested in the relationship between plants and climate.

This is the key insight. Community engagement around climate change in public gardens is most powerful not when it takes the form of information delivery — interpretation panels, guided tours, educational events — but when it invites genuine participation. People who have contributed to understanding a garden's response to climate change are people who care about its future. They become advocates, supporters, and champions in ways that passive visitors rarely do.

The implications for garden management extend beyond communication. A public garden that genuinely involves its community in decisions about how planting should evolve in response to climate change — that consults visitors and supporters about which elements of the garden's character matter most to them, that shares the reasoning behind difficult decisions about what to retain and what to let go — builds the trust and shared ownership that sustains gardens through periods of significant change. Gardens that surprise their communities with radical transformation risk losing the attachment and support that makes long-term sustainability possible. Gardens that bring their communities with them build something more durable.

Making climate change visible through planting

Beyond formal engagement programmes, the planting decisions that public garden managers make every day are themselves a form of communication. A garden that begins to incorporate climate-adapted species alongside its traditional planting — that labels these additions clearly, explains why they are there, and invites visitors to observe how they perform over time — is teaching its audience something real about climate change through the medium it knows best.

This requires a degree of transparency about the reasoning behind planting decisions that does not always come naturally to institutions more accustomed to presenting finished results than works in progress. But the alternative — making significant changes to beloved gardens without explanation, in response to pressures that visitors may not fully understand — risks exactly the kind of community alienation that research has consistently identified as one of the greatest risks to the long-term sustainability of public gardens.

A 2013 RHS survey found that a quarter of respondents said they would cancel their garden society membership if garden character was altered significantly due to climate change. That figure is a warning, but it is also an opportunity. Those same people, properly engaged and informed, become the garden's most powerful advocates for the changes that climate change makes necessary. The difference between alienation and advocacy is, largely, communication — and communication is something that public gardens, with their physical presence, their expert staff, and their established visitor relationships, are well placed to do.

The role of interpretation and education

One of the most important contributions public gardens can make to the national climate response is addressing what researchers have called plant blindness — the inability of many people to notice or engage with plants in their environment. It is a phenomenon that anyone who has worked in public horticulture will recognise: visitors who respond powerfully to the atmosphere of a garden without registering individual plants, children who notice wildlife but not the habitat that supports it, adults who find gardens beautiful in a general way but have no framework for understanding what they are looking at.

Plant blindness matters for climate change communication because people who cannot see plants cannot fully appreciate what is at stake when plants are threatened or lost. They cannot understand the significance of a declining Cordyline population in a coastal community, or a rhododendron collection under Phytophthora pressure, or a beech tree losing its vigour in a dry summer. They lack the vocabulary of observation that makes these things visible as symptoms of a larger process rather than random misfortunes.

Public gardens are uniquely positioned to address this. Through clear, engaging interpretation that builds observational skills rather than simply delivering information. Through educational programmes for schools that develop the basic vocabulary of botanical attention. Through planting designs that reward curiosity with discovery — that give visitors reasons to look more closely, to return in different seasons, to notice change over time.

Working with school children is the single most powerful intervention available in the long term. Children who develop a genuine relationship with plants and gardens carry that relationship into adult life, becoming the next generation of garden visitors, supporters, and — critically — voters and consumers whose attitudes towards the natural world will shape the policy and economic environment in which gardens operate. Public gardens that invest in school engagement are not simply doing educational outreach. They are building their own future community.

The historic garden challenge — and opportunity

Britain's historic gardens face a version of this challenge with particular intensity. These are places where community attachment is deep, where the character of the planting is bound up with cultural and historical identity, and where the pressure to change is real and growing. Getting the communication right — explaining why change is necessary while demonstrating that it is being done with care, knowledge, and genuine respect for what the garden is — is not a peripheral concern for historic garden managers. It is central to their ability to carry their communities with them through the adaptations that climate change demands.

The approach I advocate — and have explored in detail in relation to the gardens I manage and research in Cornwall — is to begin by distilling clearly what gives each garden its particular character and meaning. Which plants, which spatial qualities, which seasonal moments are most central to the experience that makes the garden what it is? That understanding, developed in genuine consultation with the people who love and use the garden, then becomes the guide for all subsequent adaptation decisions. What must be preserved at significant cost because it is irreplaceable? What can be transitioned more readily because its role is functional rather than defining? What new species or approaches can be introduced in ways that maintain or enhance the garden's essential character rather than eroding it?

This is not a simple process. But it is a far more sustainable one — ecologically, financially, and socially — than either refusing to adapt or adapting without regard for what is being lost.

Botanic gardens and the global dimension

At the most ambitious end of the spectrum, botanic gardens are already beginning to grapple with their responsibility not just to their immediate communities but to the global plant conservation challenge that climate change represents. The Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria in Melbourne has developed a strategy for transitioning their collections to the projected climate of 2090 — auditing their plants against future climate scenarios, exploring assisted migration for species unlikely to survive in situ, and using global biodiversity databases to inform the selection of climate-adapted replacements. It is a model of long-term strategic thinking that most British botanic gardens have not yet fully engaged with.

The principle of assisted migration — finding new homes, further poleward or at higher altitude, for plant species that will no longer be suited to their current locations as the climate warms — raises profound questions about the role of cultivated plant collections in the face of global ecological change. Public gardens that engage seriously with these questions, and that communicate their thinking to their visitors and supporters, are making a contribution to public understanding of climate change that goes well beyond their immediate horticultural remit.

A leadership role worth claiming

The case for public gardens as climate leaders is ultimately a case for ambition — for a broader and more confident vision of what these institutions are for. Britain's public gardens are, collectively, an extraordinary resource: repositories of botanical knowledge, centres of horticultural expertise, places of genuine community attachment, and living demonstrations of the relationship between human cultivation and the natural world.

That resource has never been more relevant. At a moment when the consequences of climate change are becoming impossible to ignore, when the disconnection between people and the natural world is increasingly recognised as a public health and ecological crisis, and when the need for community-based responses to environmental challenges is becoming clearer, public gardens are positioned to contribute something that no other institution can.

The question is not whether they have the tools. They do. The question is whether they will use them with the ambition and the clarity of purpose that the moment deserves. The gardens that do — that choose to become genuine pillars of their communities' understanding of and response to climate change — will be the ones that thrive and endure through the decades ahead. The ones that do not will find that adaptation becomes harder, support more fragile, and the justification for the resources they require more difficult to make.

The choice, in the end, is one of vision.

Jodi Dickinson MHort(RHS) is a professional horticulturist and head gardener at the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, St Ives. His RHS Master of Horticulture dissertation examined climate change adaptation strategies for public gardens in Cornwall. Juniper Gardens provides specialist garden maintenance, garden design and ecological garden care across mid and west Cornwall. View Jodi's full profile here.