What a difference a year makes: last August I was eagerly watching the sky for any sign of rain, whilst this year I am writing these notes while torrential rain falls on already wet ground. Last year we recorded a miserly 11.9mm of rain during the whole of August. This year we are up to 58mm on August 20th. Although this seems to be a high reading we here in Chipperfield have missed out on the really big storms that have caused flooding in London and many other places.
At least this year I have enough grass for the lambs and our beech trees have now had a good drink. Beech trees are very surface rooting and after a dry May and June a lot of their leaves seem to be drying out and with heavy crops of beech mast on them they were beginning to look rather brown. June was a strange month, a few very hot days and a few dull days with a sprinkle of rain: “wet days with no rain” as my father used to say.
I am no lover of hot weather and on some days the heat in our south facing vegetable garden was too much for me and some of the plants. How I longed for a good game of snowballs! The evaporation from our wildlife pool was alarming, and after wading in (a good way to cool down) and tidying up the water lilies, we had to give it 5 hours of hosepipe treatment. It did the trick, it hasn’t stopped raining since.
Our weather seems to be going all topsy turvy: last summer virtually no thunder storms and this year nothing but. In spite of the fact that we can put a man on the moon we are still no good at forecasting the weather, let alone controlling it. It seems to me that global warming is already having devastating effects, the people of Boscastle in Cornwall would say so, and this is only the beginning. Perhaps we must all change our ways. Could we walk the children to school, or cycle to the shop? Do we really need all those outside lights on at night, a burglar may fall over a flowerpot in the dark or rattle the dustbin, and with less light pollution we would see more stars in the night sky. Can we really afford to waste all that energy? Nature is a powerful force and we may have to face the consequences of our wasteful actions. Wendy Bathurst