Attentive readers will recall that, in recent years, I have worried and wittered and wrung my hands in these pages about the increasing incidents of unusual weather episodes (OK, have it your own way, climate change) and, in particular, whether these ‘abnormal’ conditions are simply temporary blips or represent a definite trend. No longer. I don’t mean that I have stopped worrying, simply that I no longer believe that they are a temporary blip.
Just at the moment it is winter temperatures which particularly concern me. As the result of an exceptionally mild December, on New Year’s Day I counted 20 flowers out in my garden, of which several were flowering out of their normal season: Vinca minor; Auricula; Rudbeckia; Bellis; Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’; Viola labradorica; Anthemis ‘Sauce Hollandaise’; Rose ‘Sweet Juliet’; and Centaurea montana. You may have counted even more. My early snowdrops (cultivated forms of Galanthus elwesii), which normally flower from 6 January, were out on Christmas Day.
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