'Sleepless nights' at tree business after heavy rain

A tree nursery has said it is facing unprecedented challenges following recent heavy rain in the South.

Hilliers in Hampshire has thousands of trees that cannot be planted because of the waterlogged soil, and the trees may be ruined if the weather does not improve soon.

The Met Office said England had already seen more than a 110% of the average amount of rainfall it would typically expect across the whole winter.

Senior production manager at Hilliers Phil Hall told the BBC: "I do have sleepless nights."

He said: "I work incredibly hard and I pride myself on my business and the nursery we've got here, and just the worrying factor of how I am going to plant these 70,000 trees is really preying on my mind."

The tree growing company produces shrubs, and both container-grown and field-grown trees, at nurseries near Romsey and Petersfield for the commercial market.

It has supplied them for more than 150 years.

The deluge the country has been experiencing is partly down to a blocked weather pattern - a high pressure system over Scandinavia is preventing the wet weather from moving away.

"You're looking at over a foot of water over every piece of land... that's just a phenomenal amount of water which the land and the environment just can't sustain," Hall said.

He said the business was also unable to sell its trees because landscape projects were being delayed. It means their product is at risk of getting root rot.

"We're massively down in turnover... we have to plant 70,000 to 80,000 trees a year," he said.

"So far we planted 1,000 trees, and I have a period of doing that from November through till March, and so basically I've got 70 days of planting to do in about four weeks."

Hall said February and March was usually the "peak season" for selling deciduous trees.

"So we should be having eight lorries a day going out of our yard delivering trees all around the whole of the UK," he said.

"We're down to two lorries at the moment."

The company plans to buy some time by refrigerating the trees to hold them back from bringing to leaf, but that can only be done for a limited time.

"If they don't go in the ground they're dead," Hall said of the surplus trees.

"There's no other conclusion for them, and that's a massive impact for our business and for the wider community, and the shortages of trees going forward.

"We won't get to that point because as a business we learn to cope with it, and we will pull through it, but it's another challenge and there's another cost which has impacted our turnover."

You can follow BBC Hampshire & Isle of Wight on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.