Gardens and global warming

Gardeners - are your gardens changing?

Are last decade's plants falling back behind others that never did so well before? Are your lawns and borders, plots and shrubberies taking on a new look? Or is all that still to come? Is global warming still to kick its way in through the garden gate?

Holidaying in an old haunt in the south west of England this last summer, I noticed a dearth of the usual gorse and heather on the moors, but an abundance of foxgloves where I didn't recall seeing any before. It might just have been that our holiday was a few weeks earlier than usual, or that the customary wild fires had burnt off the usual great mops of yellow and purple. It's hard to judge, as a sight-seer.

In my own garden, weeds predominated this year, despite several plantings of the usual shop seedlings: lobelia, pansies, violas and stocks. As for our hydrangea, its buds never came to anything: I've given up checking now: first ever failure in the six years we've had it. Yet our frail-looking primroses bloomed and blossomed year-round through 2012, through flood, snow, frost, hail and all. Come to think of it, where are they now? This time last year, bizarrely, they were in full radiance, flowering in thick bunches. Was it the July heatwave that put paid to them at last? After all, primroses aren't meant to be around in July, surely? Spring is their time - or was.

Is global warming at work in my garden, or is it just that I'm not at work in it? It's true, the weeds have been a put-off this year - not to mention the weather. But which came first, the weeds or my laziness? I'm not entirely sure.
Climate change, or just a slight drainage problem round the flowerbeds after a patch of good old British weather? It's a conundrum: that's all I know, so far.