UK plants flowering a month earlier – are you ready?

21st Feb 2022

Snowdrops can now be seen before New Year’s Day. Photo by CsabaTalaber on Unsplash

You may have seen in the news various articles about the UK’s flowers blooming on average a month earlier.

Spring now arriving 42 days earlier

Until recently trees, shrubs and flowers have sprouted and blossomed according to a centuries-old timetable. But a survey ledby Professor Ulf Büntgen at the University of Cambridge reports that trees are said to be blossoming 14 days earlier, shrubs 10 days in advance of the old timescale, and herbaceous plants leaping ahead and flowering an average 32 days earlier.

Snowdrops, for example, traditionally start to grace lawns and borders in February. But reports of this ‘first spring flower’ appearing before New Year’s Day are becoming increasingly common.

Are you ready to jump into spring?

This early flowering has knock-on implications for gardeners across the country, and who now need to be ready for spring that bit earlier.

At Draper Tools we have over 650 garden products – from lawn scarifiers and rakes to help get the lawn into tip-top condition , to shears and secateurs for pruning, and shovels and forks and trowels to ready beds and borders in time for planting.

Or why not treat yourself to a new kneeler, or new pair of gardening gloves?

Could your garden furniture do with a fresh new look? Is your patio in need of a spruce-up? We have all you need in our DIY section – from paint stripping and preparation tools to brushes and rollers.

And don’t forget the young gardener . With the days increasingly lighter for longer, what could be a more perfect wind-down after school than an hour or two in the garden?

Nature’s Calendar

For the survey, researchers looked at records dating back to 1793, and 420,000 first flowering dates for more than 400 different species of plants.

The records are held by Nature’sCalendar, part of the Woodland Trust, and it will come as no surprise to learn that this earlier flowering began back in the 1980s and down to global warming and climate change.

At Draper Tools we take seriously our commitment to helping protect the environment – you can read about our corporate approach in our Environmental Policy. We know too that it’s vital for individuals to play their part as well.

Nature’s Calendar hosts a collection of 3.5m observations relating to seasonal change, with records compiled from information sent in by the general public. ProfessorUlf Büntgen says that anyone in the UK can submit details, and urges more people to participate. “It’s an incredibly rich and varied data source,” he goes on to say, “and alongside temperature records, we can use it to quantify how climate change is affecting the functioning of various ecosystem components across the UK.”

Spring Fever

Despite the sobering message behind the earlier flowering, who can resist the thought of longer days, blue skies, the garden springing back to life – and summer on the horizon?

We’ll shortly be bringing you a blog talking about those first spring garden jobs that will need doing. In the meantime, why not take a look at your tools and see if any need replacing – or perhaps your patio furniture could do with a snazzy new colour?