We had 5 mm of rain in the early morning, bringing September’s total so far to 39 mm, well above average, although 26mm of that was delivered on Tuesday. It is catch up time, and do we need it. The drought may be over but there is a big deficit, illustrated by our pond.
I have been monitoring our rain gauge for the last year. But looking at just this summer, in April we had just 3 mm of rain, bad for the garden but awful for farmers, with vegetable and spring wheat seed newly sown. May was poor too, with just 20 mm of rain, when the monthly average is around 50 mm. June was a wet month with 134 mm, but too late for many farmers with failed crops. July was the worst, with no rain at all. No wonder we had the hosepipe ban. August was poor too, with just 21 mm. These poor rainfall figures over the summer months were exasperated by the heat, which evaporated the sparse rain way too quickly.
The EU’s climate monitoring service say, this August is the joint hottest month ever recorded. Temperatures reached 1.65 degrees above pre-industrial average. This is all before the El Niño weather system makes its impact. The news on climate change is as ever depressing. The attempt, verbal rather than actual, to constrain the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees has been a non-starter. Wild fires, and the thawing permafrost in higher latitudes adds to the warming. The latter releasing methane which is 30 times more powerful as a climate gas than CO2. Fossil fuel has us in its thrall, individually and collectively. If we add to this the impact of war; apart from the killing, all the drones and bombs inject still more gases into our atmosphere.
Our garden is a microcosm, registering these additions, with the rising temperatures and the increasingly dry summers. I was going to write ‘we know this too well’ but there are the deniers. Trump takes the prize for this with with his ‘Drill, baby, drill.’ His clone in the UK, Nigel Farage, joins him in denial. No wonder we are doing so badly. But, there is always a but, we can lessen the impact of climate change, individually and governmentally, by cutting down our use of fossil fuels and encouraging others to do so.
A plant I have been keeping an eye on is the fothergilla in the Fothergill bed. It is a small shrub named after the 18th century plant collector who had what is now West Ham Park as his estate. About a month ago, the fothergilla appeared dead, the leaves shrivelled barely green at all. I uprooted it and teased out the roots, replanted it and watered it daily, doing so religiously. The shrub is quite expensive, and is symbolic in this particular flower bed. After a couple of weeks new leaves began appearing, and now we have a late flowering, with its bottle brush blooms.
So something useful done this summer.
Our barrels are refilling with the recent rainfall. The pond has a long way to go. I wonder if any frogs survived the drought. They leave the pond in June as froglets, but then have to survive the drought and heat of July and August. Any maturing adults of previous years will suffer the same scourge. Last year, we had no home grown tadpoles, only those donated. We won’t know till March if next year will be the same.