Val explains how she has been coping with the challenging weather these past months
This February lived up to the name ‘February Fill Dyke’, and more, as I’m sure you noticed! It was the wettest February for 258 years and, personally, I hope that it will be another 258 years before we see the like again. Areas of the country have seen up to three times as much rain as usual and there’s been very little sunshine. Last February was very different, almost springlike, and there were plenty of fine days.
This year my early crocuses, the ones the voles missed, and my snowdrops were blown to bits, for my exposed garden is almost 800 feet above sea level.
Lots of early gardening openings and plant sales were cancelled in my neck of the woods. Most embarrassingly, my car got stuck in the mud when I was visiting Thenford Arboretum near
Banbury in Oxfordshire. I had to be pushed out by four of Lord Heseltine’s male gardeners. It did have its funny side, because the Head Gardener told me, with great authority, to take the hand brake off and put it into second gear - so I did. Unfortunately, he omitted to say - start the car! Mansplaining, something women put up with all the time, definitely went wrong on this occasion.
Why was the weather in February so grim?
The problem was partly caused by warmer seas, due to El Niño, meaning little boy in Spanish. The water in the Pacific Ocean warms up and weakens the trade winds, which normally flow westwards along the Equator. They begin to flow eastwards instead. No one knows how long this weather pattern will last, or when it will occur again. It’s been around for centuries though and was first noticed by fishermen in the 1600s: they began to catch exotic fish in the Pacific Ocean, from warmer parts of the world, close to Christmas.
The other factor is far more recent and frightening. Our polar ice caps are melting away due to global warming. This is disrupting the Jet Stream and it’s become erratic. The Gulf Stream, a stream of warm air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico, is weakening. If it collapses entirely, the UK and Northern Europe could suffer extremely cold weather.
We do what we can to help
I’m trying to do my bit for the planet by following the mantra of reduce (what you buy), reuse (wherever possible) and then recycle (as a last resort). I have lots of plastic flower pots and, when I see them, my mind spins back to something the late Alan Bloom once said to me.
Alan, who gardened at Bressingham in Norfolk, lived a frugal, simple life. I once asked him what the most significant development in gardening was in his lifetime and he replied the plastic pot. It allowed Blooms of Br
