Climate change is bringing extreme summer heat to many more countries, but using the right plants in your garden could help keep your home that bit cooler next summer.

As the autumn planting season begins, this is a great time to plan ahead for next summer. Planting at this time of year can also help your climbers and shrubs get settled ahead of spring.

After the 2026 heatwaves, many people are looking at what they can do to help mediate those very hot days that have started to happen more regularly. But that doesn’t have to mean investing in an expensive air-conditioning unit.

Anyone with a garden, or even balcony, could have a far cheaper answer. Plants are nature’s own air-conditioning units.

Plants mitigate excess heat in three main ways. They create shade near them, reducing the amount of solar light that is absorbed and which bounces back from hard surfaces such as roads or driveways as infra-red radiation (heat).

They also use light to evapotranspire – converting liquid water into vapour – and this dissipates energy without raising the temperature. This keeps plant tissues and their surrounding environment cool. And thirdly, depending on their leaf properties (colour, texture, waxiness or hairiness), some plants also reflect incoming solar radiation back out to space (the albedo effect), avoiding this........

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