This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Climate change is bringing extreme summer heat to many more countries, but using the right plants in your garden could help keep your home a bit cooler next summer. As the fall planting season begins, this is a good time to plan for next summer.
Planting now can also help your climbing plants and shrubs get established before spring. After the 2026 heat waves, many people are looking for ways to cope with very hot days that have started to happen more regularly. But that doesn't have to mean investing in an expensive air conditioner.
Anyone with a garden, or even a balcony, could have a much cheaper answer. Plants are nature's own air conditioners. Plants mitigate excess heat in three main ways.
They create shade, reducing the sunlight absorbed by hard surfaces such as roads or driveways and then radiated back as infrared radiation (heat). They also use light to evapotranspire—converting liquid water into vapor—and this dissipates energy without raising the temperature. This keeps plant tissues and their surroundings cool.
Third, depending on their leaf properties (color, texture, waxiness or hairiness), some plants reflect incoming solar radiation back into space (the albedo effect), preventing this energy from becoming heat. Silver-leaved plants are thought to be particularly good at this, including Colorado spruce, blue fescue grass and lamb's ear. Researchers have known for many years that plants can both cool a building in summer and insulate it from cold in winter.
But many of the systems promoted for commercial buildings—green "living" walls and green roofs—are relatively expensive and difficult for the average homeowner to build. Yet plants provide the same benefits whether they are part of a sophisticated architectural feature or simply garden plants positioned to beautify the house or provide food for the household. Indeed, some of the most effective passive cooling systems for homes involve plants such as climbing plants (vines), wall shrubs or trees strategically placed to block the sun in summer.
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