The Garden Climate Assessment Tool, developed with the RHS, National Trust, English Heritage and Royal Botanic Gardens, aims to show gardeners how plants may cope with their future local climate, the Guardian reports.
A coalition of UK horticultural organisations is developing a free online tool to help gardeners judge which plants are likely to survive future climate conditions, the Guardian reported in an exclusive on 3 November 2026. The Garden Climate Assessment Tool (GCAT), developed by the Future National Gardens Group (FNGG), is designed to evaluate how a plant could tolerate the projected climate of a location chosen by the user. The FNGG brings together horticultural, heritage and landscape organisations including the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), the National Trust, English Heritage and the Royal Botanic Gardens.
Users will be able to enter a list of plants, and the tool will weigh factors such as annual average temperature, a plant's natural distribution, winter cold and climate dryness. According to the Guardian, the system currently holds up to 80,650 plant types and data from 289 UK gardens, with plans for continual updates to strengthen its predictions. It builds on a climate assessment tool for trees launched in Australia in 2022 by Botanic Gardens Conservation International, extended here to cover plants more widely. Professional gardeners have been invited to trial it and give feedback; the RHS's director of science, Alistair Griffiths, said the long-term hope is to make it available to the wider gardening public, although no release timeline has been set.
The report quotes both supporters and those who see gaps. Sam Brockington of Cambridge University Botanic Garden said the tool could identify plants that are struggling so they can gradually be removed from collections, while Clive Boase of the charity Climate Change Gardening said it could help gardeners in eastern England, the UK's driest region, move away from water-hungry features such as lawns, hydrangeas and delphiniums. Griffiths acknowledged that soil type is not currently a variable, a limitation that Kim Shrosbree of the Epsom Garden Society said matters, since chalk and clay gardens face opposite conditions. The account comes from a single publisher's exclusive and the tool is still in testing, so its predictions have not yet been publicly validated.
