THE MILD SEASON.
T" year that is gone has supplied some of the longest spells of untimely weather within memory. An April during which in many parts of the kingdom not a drop of rain fell was succeeded by a soaking summer, which prevented farmers from carrying their scanty hay-crops and rotted the corn while still in the ear ; and the year came to an end with a wet December which was the mildest and warmest since the month of December, 1868. Dr. H. R. Mill in the Times has summed up some of the records of this exceptional month. The mean temperature of 45'8 degrees was 6.1 degrees warmer than the average, and only one-fifth of a degree less than the mean temperature of December, 1868, which was 46 degrees. In one respect the month was the warmest December on record. The mean of the highest temperatures was 50.8 degrees, the nearest figures to which are the 501 degrees of 1868 and the 501 degrees of 1900. With the warm temperature there was an unusual amount of rain and wind, which has continued into January. Christmas was one of the wettest and wildest which anybody remembers, or at all events cares to remember, and since Christmas we have day after day of rain on south-easterly and south-westerly gales.
The effect of this long-continued spell of warmth and wet, with its intervals of bright sunlight, in bringing forward the earlier stages of various forms of wild growth has been very remarkable. Wild flowers and garden flowers are bloominb, as we see them more often in March than in January. The primroses in the woods have already been in flower for weeks. There are few months of the year, of course, in which you cannot find a primrose in blossom in these islands, from October in the south country to July in the Hebrides. The natural date for primroses to begin to show in buds and small, short-stalked flowers among stubby, crinkled leaves is December, except in cold and frosty weather. But this year the woods in December have been not merely dotted but carpeted with primroses, and among or near the primroses the other wild flowers have been just as unusually forward. In a particular stretch of Sussex woodland which is in mind the daffodils, which in an ordinary mild season show blossom in March, are already pointing their buds on stalks of six and seven inches among the fallen beech leaves; among the primroses are dog-violets in blossom and wild strawberry plants, and in a sheltered spot at the end of December the writer actually found the cuckoo-flower, or lady's-smock—a flower which belongs to the cowslips and springing grass of April and May. April is the month, too, for the white violet, under a Sussex hedgerow, but white violets were found in bloom a fortnight ago. On the Surrey border there are kexes in flower on the ditch banks, and catkins shaking out their pollen over the kexes; and on January 5th the writer found the lesser celandine opened wide to the sun—the earliest of which he has any note. It must have opened in December. In the garden the flowers are quite as untimely. To find a large bush of Rhododendron Nobleanum in full crimson blossom early in December is unusual, but rhododendrons are rather oddly capricious plants, and give or withhold blooms in a way which is net always easy to account for. But the records of the simpler, commoner flowers, too, have been exceptional. Polyanthuses and primroses, of course, have been in bloom since September, and some of the polyanthus plants are putting out a growth vigorous enough for three months hence; but it is less usual to find snowdrops in bud on December 15th, aconites shouldering up in the middle of the month and in open flower by the end. Hyacinths are already inches high in leaf, with the folded blossom showing thick and warm between, and on January 5th there was a single yellow crocus (not a colchicum) spread wide in the sunlight. There are others which need no more than a few more hours of sunlight to open. Crocuses come to a slow and certain stage of growth before they thrust their coloured spears up from the spiky bunch of surrounding leaves, but when once the flower pushes clear, the interval between bud and open, breathing flower in the sun is almost one of minutes. They are flowers, too, of individual haloits. In any large number of crocuses there are sure to he a few which year after year are several days earlier than the rest. The common yellow crocus, doubtless the hardiest, is the earliest; the latest seem to be the rarer and more delicate mauves.
These early garden flowers, after a warm, wet December, depend for their period of flowering upon those hours of pro- longed and mellow sunlight which occasionally set themselves in a queerly separate way among days of grey skies and driving clouds. It is perhaps for that reason that in forward seasons like the present London is behind the country gardens with her early ilowers. In some ways London is always ahead. London cheetaut trees are in leaf before the country trees, and the leaves fall, too, earlier in the autumn. But the periods of sunshine which warm the flower-beds of the parks and gardens must be much shorter in January in London than in country air which is free from smoke and fog. And with- out the winter sunshine the sap of the winter flowers mounts later. In Kensington Gardens, for instance, there are a few snowdrops in the grass, and the green daggers of the irises in the beds are strong and thrusting, aide by side with the scented boughs of the pink-and-white da,phne mezereums and opening wallflowers. But the polyanthuses have not yet answered to the early warmth as they have in the country air, and the pointing leaves ef the daffodils are shorter and less conspicuous from a distance Perhaps, too, spring in winter is never so quickly found in London because of the silence or absence of the country birds. Here and there an isolated thrush pipes bravely enough by the Row or the Serpentine, but there is nothing of the mixed chorus of the woods and fields—the robin changing his meditative winter carol to a loud impetuous trill, a wren suddenly throwing out a fierce little jet of music from the farm paling, great tits answering each other from the larch-tops, nuthatches repeating their sharp, questioning single notes or the reiterated wryneck-like call of spring, and through and over all the missel-thrush flinging out his wild song of the height and the open ways from the windy crown of the elms. The impulse of the sunshine is for more than mere singing. The rooks have already come back to visit their nests, and on Tuesday morning were busy building up the old etructures into new.
The year is no doubt exceptional, but these early move- ments towards the full life of spring are not, of course, unprecedented. All these things have happened before, and will happen again. If we turn back to the records of other warm, wet winters we find the same entries in country diaries of birds building and flowers in blossom before their Lime. Take, for instance, the records of January 1869, when there were almost identically the same conditions of a wet December with a high mean temperature and a mild January
following it. The columns of the Field of the first two or three weeks of the year contain just the same kind of
information which surprises readers of to-day's newspapers.
Here is Mr. A. R. Monck ton Russell, for instance, writing from Laverton Rectory, Bath, to chronicle the fact that he has a
robin sitting on four eggs in a hedge in the rectory garden. Mr. Philip Papillon notes a late swallow as flying round Leaden Manor, Colchester, on December 13th. "Tipperary Boy," shooting near Killaloe, mentions the appearance of a butterfly "in full force and apparently enjoying himself as if it had been a warm summer day." Barley was found in the ear on January 8th, " growing in an open field of seven acres or so. It has grown from corn knocked out during the harvest, and the field has more the appearance of June than January." A correspondent writes from York to state that on January 9th the rooks have ieturned to their nests. Finally, on January 9th we read a letter from Mr. Henry Byne, writing from Milligan Hall, near Taunton, to say that a partridge's nest of eight eggs nearly hatched was found a few days ago by a labourer on the glebe land of King's Nympton, North Devon. And so on ; the cycle of the seasons repeats itself, mildness and warmth following east winds and frost and snow. The cycles recur, and with them fresh wonder at the facts which seem always new, and are as old as the seasons themselves. A year is a long enough period in which to forget much, and already, perhaps, most of us have forgotten the exceptional weather of the early spring of last year. Weather never becomes ancient history, and that is why the changes which it brings come always with a sense of surprise; we forget how much we have forgotten.
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