The Rain It Raineth Every Day

How quaint - a blog. And not just a blog, but a blog written by a person! Somehow the weather has made it difficult to sit down and write recently. I guess too because blogging suddenly feels rather dated...  

How life changes. It doesn't seem so long ago I was arguing about rainfall with some swivel eyed loon on what was then Twitter - it must have been around 2016. I was bemoaning the weather. No, he said, the recent extreme rainfall was normal. It was the Environment Agency which was causing the flooding. When someone else chimed in and said actually there had been a lot of rain but it was because of cloud seeding I knew it was time to reach for a stiff drink.

I hope we have moved on from this. The link between the U.K.'s warmer and increasingly wet winters and climate change must now be clear to all but the most hardened conspiracists (and possibly Donald Trump). This year it has been apocalyptic down here - bad by even Somerset standards. We have had hitherto unsuspected springs bursting into life in our meadows, which are now sprouting Soft rush everywhere. 

Oddly though it is only now dawning on people what the cost of all this is going to be. I'm not talking about sorting out the craterlike potholes and the scoured gulleys running with water down all the lanes. The implications are of course much wider - ask any farmer hereabouts. The landscape is going to change very significantly over the next decade, even if it's not permanently underwater. People just aren't imagining this or thinking how to mitigate or adapt to it.

The horticultural world is pretty typical of that. People have been incredibly slow to think about plant resilience not to drought and hot summers, but to mild and wet winters. How much comment has there been about planning for this? It's relatively easy to find drought resistent plants and come up with helpful strategies to help them over the summer, but how will they fare in these warm winter quagmires?  I don't think we've directly lost anything here to dry weather; all our fatalities - and there have certainly been more than you would normally expect - have been caused by the wet. 

We have clay soil, which certainly doesn't help, and prolonged rain means compaction, which makes things worse. Waterlogged soil means plants are deprived of oxygen, which can be terminal. In its mildest form this means poor nutrient uptake and leaching, but it will lead to root rot and the spead of pathogens. We've had several semi-mature trees just give up the ghost, and noticed many more problems with canker on fruit trees too.  We've worked hard to use swales, ditches and other features to improve drainage, but they're overwhelmed. We have hitherto unsuspected springs bursting into life in our meadows, which now have running water tracking across them are sprouting Juncus. 

I'm not sure what the answer is. Obviously, ornamental wetland species are going to die in the summer. Mediterranean drought resistant plants will die in the winter. What to do? There's only going to be a relatively small number of plants which can cope with these conditions. It means more care, for sure; wood chip mulch is a terrific help, for example, and we need to think more about exact planting positions. Ironically, I wonder if it also means using more of our native species?