The next 12 months, it’s about dwarf aubergines. Just stick them there, beside the chilli plant centrepiece. Mind your head on the baby cucumber hanging basket as you come in.
Flowers are very 2025. In 2026, stand down the spiky gladiola, forget the struggling rush to remove price stickers from hastily bought petrol station flowers. If you want to say it, say it with vegetables.
That’s from the arbiters of the earth and roots, the Royal Horticultural Society. It’s part of their set of predictions for 2026. We’re in that period when people tell us what to expect in the year ahead. The RHS have also some more telling pieces of foresight. Gardeners in the UK will increasingly look for drought-tolerant plants, they believe, as climate change makes summers drier.
That sounds an ominous note, a dark-tasting tannin to see in the new year. There is something altogether funnier about bringing a bunch of vegetables to somebody’s house. It’s potentially the start of a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode that spirals.
Besides, we don’t have to try too hard to get any number of bleak predictions. According to Forbes, due to the march of AI we’re going to start drowning in data. “AI doesn’t just use data,” they say, “it creates more of it. 80% of all new data generated globally is unstructured, and it’s growing 55% a year.”
It’s probably a good thing we’re drowning in data, because with the amount of water needed to run data centres, there won’t be much of that around! Maybe the RHS have baked that in. Quite what we’re going to do with all this data, that begets more and more data, I don’t know. Suppose I could ask AI.
