Half of Wimpole’s new trees perished in drought of 2022

About half the trees planted on the Wimpole Estate perished in 2022’s sweltering heat – and on some sections of land, the losses reached 90 per cent.

The figures come as the National Trust warns that last year’s tumultuous weather will become the new ‘norm’, causing a range of impacts for nature if urgent action isn’t taken.

A warm January followed by back-to-back tree-toppling storms in February, a dry spring, a summer of record-breaking temperatures and a prolonged heatwave causing severe drought, ending with December’s cold snap, gave UK wildlife a difficult year, with many species and habitats struggling to cope.

The National Trust has huge ambitions to increase tree cover on its land and is aiming to establish 20 million trees on its land by 2030.

A £1.3million investment enabled the planting of 90,000 trees across the Wimpole Estate, with the National Trust saying at the time that it was its largest and most diverse tree planting project to date.

However, the drought and high levels of heat had huge impacts on the trust’s planting projects from last winter, and up to 90 per cent of new trees were lost in some small parcels of land at Wimpole, where the average survival rate was about 50 per cent.

Luke Barley, trees and woodlands adviser at the National Trust, said: “These young trees haven’t had the chance to fully establish, and therefore unfortunately don’t have the root system or mass to help them survive during periods of drought.”

Similarly, only half of the new trees at the Buscot and Coleshill Estate in Oxfordshire survived but there were better successes in Wales, where 80 per cent of newly-planted trees survived, thanks to higher levels of rain and moisture in the soil.

Luke added: “While it is normal to lose a small proportion of tree saplings in any given planting scheme, losing this many across so many sites has a real impact on our efforts to increase woodland cover.

“This impacts on our efforts to deliver nature-based solutions, let alone targets for UK tree planting, but we will learn from these past 12 months and adapt our plans accordingly.

“For instance, where we have used mulch or kept grass long around the saplings to help hold in moisture when planting trees, our saplings have fared much better, and we’ll be taking these points of learning forwards.

“We’re also finding that trees which have developed from natural colonisation are doing much better. This is because when trees self-seed they establish good root systems from germination – so have more built-in resilience in times of challenging conditions.”

Drought also caused lawns to dry up and summer border plants in the trust’s gardens going over earlier than normal. Tenant farmers reported challenges in some areas, with a lack of grass for livestock and the heat stunting the growth of arable crops.

It also contributed to a ‘false’ autumn, with early leaf drop in many areas. It was, however, a mast year for some nuts and berries and the lack of late frosts aided the apple harvest.

Keith Jones, climate change adviser at the National Trust, said: “Drought, high temperatures, back-to-back storms, unseasonal heat, the recent cold snap and floods means nature, like us, is having to cope with a new litany of weather extremes.

“It is a stark illustration of the sort of difficulties many of our species will face if we don’t do more to mitigate rising temperatures and helping nature’s survival.

“Weather experts predict that the future will see more torrential downpours, along with very dry and hot summers, with 2022 setting a benchmark for what a ‘typical’ year for weather could be like.

“But the ‘new normal’ is also likely to result in even more extreme weather events than now.

“We’re going to experience more floods, droughts, heatwaves, extreme storms and wildfires – and they will go from bad to worse, breaking records with ever-alarming frequency if we don’t limit our carbon emissions.”