Christmas tree growers have warned of potential shortages in the coming years after Britain’s record-breaking summer heat and prolonged drought killed thousands of newly planted trees and damaged established crops.
Growers across the country said exceptionally hot and dry conditions during the summer of 2026 had made it difficult for young trees to survive, raising concerns about future supplies of the festive staple.
With Christmas trees typically spending about eight years growing in the ground before being harvested, the damage could have consequences well beyond this winter.
Oliver Combe, 57, who has worked at York Christmas Trees for 40 years, described the season as a “tough year”. He told The Telegraph: “For the first time ever, we have had losses in what we planted last year.”
Combe said he had switched to planting in autumn to give trees more time to establish strong root systems before the summer. But even that strategy failed to protect his latest crop from the extreme conditions: about 2,000 of the 15,000 trees he planted were lost.
Older trees were also affected. A lack of rainfall meant fertiliser could not be properly absorbed into the soil, leaving established crops struggling to grow.
“This year, we have had no proper rain since Easter,” Combe said.
He is now considering irrigation systems to protect his fields against increasingly dry summers, warning that conditions once considered exceptional were becoming more familiar.
“The summer of 2018 was pretty extreme,” he said. “We did think it was an exception before, but very, very hot summers are becoming the norm. In Yorkshire, we used to have drier Aprils and Mays, but it seems to be drier for longer. We all think ‘oh, it will balance out over August’, but one of my fields is still bone dry.”
The financial impact has also been severe for other growers. James Wallis, who runs Sutton Hall Farm near Lewes in East Sussex with his wife Ruth, told the BBC that the couple had lost 20,000 trees planted two years ago. He described the financial consequences as “significant”.
The warnings follow a summer that the Met Office confirmed was the hottest in the UK’s recorded history. Average mean temperatures across June, July and August reached 16.5C, incorporating both daytime and overnight readings, in a dataset dating back to 1884.
Temperatures exceeded 38C in parts of the country, with the highest reading of the summer reaching 38.2C at Hartpury College in Gloucestershire on August 13. That made it the UK’s fifth-hottest day on record by maximum temperature, although it remained below the all-time high of 40.3C recorded at Coningsby, Lincolnshire, in July 2022.
The Met Office said human-induced climate change had made the heat experienced this summer 130 times more likely.
The pressure on growers does not necessarily mean shoppers will struggle to find a tree this Christmas. Russell Parkins, chairman of the British Christmas Tree Association, said: “There are enough trees, but it’s a challenge to keep them in good condition.”
However, the losses raise questions about the resilience of Britain’s Christmas tree industry as growers contend with more frequent heat and drought. Because trees take years to mature, replacing those lost this summer will not be an immediate process.
For growers, the concern is therefore not simply whether there will be enough trees to decorate homes this December, but whether the next generation of crops can withstand the changing climate.
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