nodded encouragingly, and she went on. ‘The last few years we’ve had more rain than I ever remember.’ She paused. ‘And no snow either. The last proper snow,’ (and she emphasised the word ‘proper’ to show that she meant snowploughs, the town cut off and so on) ‘was over twenty years ago. The snow we’ve had in the last few years has been hardly anything. Instead, it’s been rain, rain, rain.’
On sale next to the desk were several Christmas cards, each showing children making a snowman under a heavy winter sky, the pretty white flakes swirling around them as they gathered up the snow in their duffle coats and woolly mittens. It was the traditional British winter, everyone’s dream of a white Christmas. And what no one knows – or likes to admit – is that it’s probably gone for good.
SNOW PLACE TO GO
Snow was becoming a rarity even during my childhood. Apart from the years in Peru, I grew up in a small Nottinghamshire village called Colston Bassett – a tiny place with little more than a pub, a primary school, and a local dairy famous for its pungent stilton cheese. Every autumn the village held a harvest festival, when all the local farmers would bring their produce into the village hall for a lavish evening meal. I looked forward to it for two reasons: because I and the other village kids were allowed to get drunk on cider; and because it meant the onset of winter.
I loved winter. From the first frosts in October to the bursting of the buds in April I’d scan the skyline almost hourly for snow. It came, too: we even got snow on Easter Sunday one year. In January 1987 it fell so heavily overnight that the drifts piled up against the side of the house and meant a day off school. The school bus got through after a couple of days, but the snow lasted for almost a fortnight. Every winter there’d always be a few centimetres of snow which would generally last for two or three days. I was filled with barely-suppressed excitement each time the first flakes fluttered past the school windows.
I haven’t seen snow like this for over seven years in Oxford, which isn’t too far from where I grew up. Back in 1996 there were a few days of snow (no big deal, less than ten centimetres deep. I remember it principally because I fell off my bicycle on the ice) but since then nothing. In fact snow has become so rare that when it does fall – often just for a few hours – everything grinds to a halt. In early 2003 a ‘mighty’ five-centimetre snowfall in southeast England caused such severe traffic jams that many motorists had to stay in their cars overnight. Today’s kids are missing out: I haven’t seen a snowball fight in years, and I can’t even remember the last time I saw a snowman.
A quick glance at the official weather records for Oxford confirms my rather hazy impressions. The last decent snow was in 1985, when there were twenty-one days of snow cover. The winter of 1963 was the most extreme in England since 1740, and during the 1970s snow days averaged about eight days per season. How things have changed. Six out of the last ten years have been completely snowless, whereas between 1960 and 1990 there were only two snowless winters during the whole three decades.17
By the 2080s our grandchildren will only experience snow on the highest mountaintops in Scotland, because over most of the English lowlands and the south coast snowfall will be virtually unknown.18
Other familiar things may also look very different. Take the average British garden. Lawns will need mowing all year round, and will die in summer droughts unless heavily watered. Traditional herbaceous border species like aster, delphiniums and lupins will also struggle in the dry soils. Tree-ferns, palms, bamboos and bananas will replace holly, oak and ash. Many fruiting trees and bushes need winter chilling for bud formation, so blackcurrants and apples will need to be replaced with peaches and grapes. Overwintering bulbs need low temperatures to stimulate their development, so gardeners will need to dig up the bulbs and refrigerate them for a few days in order to coax spring flowers out of them. New pests and diseases will spread out of the greenhouse and into the open garden. Aphids, for example, begin their infestations two weeks earlier for every 1°C rise in temperature.19
Many of these changes are already underway, but have been accelerating over the last two decades. Termites have already moved into southern England. Garden centres are beginning to stock exotic sub-tropical species, which only a few years ago would have been killed off by winter.20 In Surrey, horse chestnut trees now come into leaf twelve days earlier than they did in the 1980s. Oak is coming out ten days earlier, and ash six days earlier. Winter aconites are now flowering a month earlier than three decades ago, and crocuses – which used to flower in March – are now putting out petals in mid-January.21 The average UK growing season is now longer than at any time since records began in 1772. In 2000 there was hardly any cold weather at all: the growing season extended from 29 January to 21 December, leaving just thirty-nine days of winter.22
In the summer of 2003 temperatures broke through the crucial 100°F level for the first time in recorded history, peaking at 100.6°F (38.1°C) on 10 August at Gravesend in Kent. Continental Europe, meanwhile, suffered its highest temperatures for 500 years, sparking catastrophic forest fires in France, Spain and Portugal, and killing thousands of elderly people in the sweltering cities. In France alone almost 15,000 people died in the heatwave, sparking a national crisis of guilt and soul-searching as the bodies piled up. Even in the cooler UK, 2000 people died.
Heatwaves catch the headlines, but the insidious effect of higher average temperatures is having a permanent effect on our surroundings. Indeed, the temperature rise is now so rapid that in climatic terms English gardens are moving south by twenty metres each day.23 (This is because, with every 1°C rise in temperature, climatic zones move 150 kilometres north.) English temperatures are predicted to soar by up to 5°C this century alone,24 so by the 2080s our gardens will – metaphorically speaking – be nearing the south of France.
This is particularly bad news for ‘heritage gardens’. The National Trust will be faced with the choice of uprooting everything from its much-loved English country gardens and trucking them to the north of Scotland, or giving up and letting the traditional species die.
In fact the British countryside our grandchildren grow up in is likely to be a very different place to the one we see today. According to the Woodland Trust, increased drought and water stress from hotter, dryer summers means that parts of London, East Anglia and the Midlands might become unsuitable for beech trees in the near future. Although beech woods on chalk soils should fare better (plant roots seem to be able to draw water large distances up through porous chalk rock), die-back has already begun in parts of East Anglia and Southern England. ‘In the worst-case scenarios, beech could soon be absent from large areas of the south,’ the Trust concludes.25
Oaks are also going to be on the endangered list. Although more likely to withstand summer droughts and winter floods, oak trees are threatened by a new disease called oak wilt – which has already devastated woodland in North America.26 Oak wilt thrives in warmer winters: it could turn into a plague of similar proportions to Dutch Elm Disease, which virtually wiped out elms in the UK, once a common wood and hedgerow tree species. Because of Dutch Elm Disease, I have never seen a fully-grown elm tree: and when I was growing up every field boundary was lined with their enormous skeletal carcasses. Could oaks go the same way?
Instead of these familiar trees, woodlands are likely to be predominantly composed of sycamore, with other invasive species like rhododendron and Japanese knotweed making up the undergrowth. The animals which currently fit into our woodland ecosystems will also disappear – woodpeckers, butterflies, frogs and toads – all will need to move to cooler climes or die.27
In