Tag Archives: Phenology

Natural History, Nature Reserves, Wildlife

Roses in the Snow? Global warming, maybe

Crepis vesicaria - Beaked Hawk's-beard
Crepis vesicaria – Beaked Hawk’s-beard

Emmylou Harris sang of sunshine in December and roses in the snow. It’s only the 28th of October, so not that late in the year yet, but the mercury climbed to an improbable 18 Celsius – that’s T-shirts and sunhats for work down at the nature reserve – and there were indeed roses blooming in the garden.

For the record, also in flower today were Alpine Pink, Tayberry, Squash, Strawberry, Primula, Nasturtius, Hydrangea, the little New Zealand Sorrel that manages to grow between the paving stones, and Daisy.

Down at the reserve, Beaked Hawksbeard has come back into flower (for the second time this year) on the picnic meadow. It seems that the warm weather has coaxed the plants to try flowering. They’ll get a bit of a shock with the change coming in the weather tomorrow, probably. It certainly feels like an odd bit of Phenology, but of course we won’t know for many years whether this is part of a long-term trend to do with global warming, especially as the global average temperature has been taking a holiday from its inexorable rise for some years now. When the temperature does take off, it will be too late to stop, and very costly to mitigate.

Judging by the feeble global co-operation on the far more obvious and immediate threat of Ebola virus, it’s hard to be optimistic about our ability to collaborate as a species on anything as large as global warming. The Drake equation, the one that predicts the number of intelligent civilisations in our galaxy, has a term for the lifetime of a civilisation, as Prof. Brian Cox recently explained in his TV series Human Universe. If it’s only a few centuries, that would neatly explain why – despite the profusion of suitable-looking planets – we haven’t been contacted by any other civilisation. That would imply that “intelligent” life never lasts very long on any planet. However hard it tries to be sensible, selfishness – which must always be favoured by evolution for short-term gain – always takes over, and people use up the resources of their home planet until – pof! – they wipe themselves out. Just clever enough to be really stupid. What a cheerful thought.

Environment, Gardening, Natural History

The Foxgloves are early, the Nasturtiums flower all winter

 

Foxglove
Foxgloves, growing in a shady corner of the garden

My foxgloves are beautifully in flower. They began around the 11th of May and are now in full bloom. Most are dressed in traditional purple with the insides of the “gloves” spotted deep purple in white areas, as if the pigment had been dragged together into clumps. Some are in unspotted white: creamy when closed, dazzling greenish-white in full bloom. This is seemingly a naturally-occurring variation, with perhaps a single mutation preventing pigment development.

Nothing extraordinary there? The clue is the date. Back in the 1940s in Dorset, John Stuart Collis calmly states that Foxgloves come out in August.

The odd science of Phenology tracks the dates when natural events occur in different years, thereby building up an accurate picture of changes in many species. The idea is seen in one of the classics of natural history, Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789), which includes observations of the first Swallow to arrive, and so forth, and in some editions actual tables of phenological observations. These are described as “A comparative view of the Naturalist’s Calendar as kept at Selborne in Hampshire by the late Rev. Gilbert White MA and at Catsfield near Battle in Sussex by William Markwick Esq FLS from the year 1768 to the year 1793.”  For the record, White notes Foxglove from May 30 to June 22; Markwick notes the same species from May 23 to June 15.

So in this case the anomalous datum looks more like Collis’s than mine. Still, flowering does seem to be earlier; explanations could include that London is warmer than the countryside, that plant varieties may differ, and climate change.

Mind you, even Gilbert White would have had a hard time recording the phenology of the Nasturtium this year. Without a winter frost, which usually kills them in December, the plants survived all through the winter, and have remained in flower essentially continuously. “1 January—31 December”, I suppose.

Nasturtium
Nasturtium, all natural. The colour is as the camera saw it, and the water droplets are rain or dew, where nature left them.