May is the new June

After the driest, hottest April since records began, two thirds of gardeners are reporting earlier blooming bulbs - but apparently only just over a quarter are convinced it is caused by climate change - though most gardeners are worried about water shortages, and a third believe thirsty cottage garden favourites like delphiniums and lupins are doomed.

Photos: last of the bluebells in Standish woods

As we now go into May it is clear May is becoming the new June: in 2005 plants were flowering 11 days ahead of 2001 - by my reckoning it is earlier still this year. Infact I see a 'Bluebell Walk' advertised for 12th May and 19th May locally doubt they'll see a single bluebell.

Bluebells, voted Britains favorite flower, usually flower locally at least into early May but they were already mostly over a week ago. The worry is that warmer winters may mean that bluebells are losing their advantage as other plants start growing earlier....

I remember reading recently that a woman, Christine d’Albert from Herefordshire recalled how for her birthday on 22 May her mother would always bake her a cake, poking drinking straws in the top and inserting a bluebell into each straw among the candles. ‘My memory goes back to 1944,’ she says, ‘and my mother’s practice continued into the early 1950s. In recent years I have watched bluebells flowering much earlier – more like 22 April and as early as 19 April in 2001.’

Across the world we are witnessing similar changes with other plants and wildlife...

"Oak before ash, we're in for a splash,
Ash before oak, we're in for a soak."
Old seasonal couplet

For 160 years ash has managed to beat the oak three years out of 10, but in the past 30 years it has done it only 10% of the time. The oak which liberated it's leaves according to rising temperatures is just one more indicator of warming climate. The impact of such changes we are hardly even beginning to grasp - but is something we will need to do very soon.

In the meantime as the founders of Common Ground argue "viewed another way, climate change is but a symtom of our deeper malaise, of which we have to address the cause." They say we need to "get to know something of nature intimately: not as tickers and twitchers or recyclers and energy-savers, but as walkers and dreamers, gardeners and makers. We need to understand the wild things need in order to survive. They need our respect in their own right, and our futures are intimately bound with theirs."

Their website has much to offer in this respect to help us reconnect "with the land and with colourful, scented and flying things."