Always take the weather with you

Anita Roy The land around them is rich, and there is that likes the certainties of life and is averse plenty of rain and warmth to make things to change, (Jefferson, 2011). The regularity Somerset, UK grow all the year round… As one writer of the forecast, the hypnotic, almost nurs- humorously puts it, ‘the natives lie flat on ery-rhyme like incantation of ‘Dogger, Walking ’round the room singing Stormy their backs and the bananas drop into Fisher, German Bight’ and the unbroken Weather their mouths’. So, like all spoiled children, audio link through the years and back to At fifty-seven Mount Pleasant Street they cannot do anything for themselves. our childhoods – and even further back to Well it’s the same room, but everything’s Since they do not need to work or plan for our parents’ childhoods and perhaps even different a living, they never have learned how to their parents’ childhoods – offers soothing

Weather – June 2016, Vol. 71, No. 6 71, No. Vol. – June 2016, Weather You can fight the sleep, but not the dream work or plan for anything else… They are reassurance that, though the rough winds still savages because of their climate. may rage upon the seas that surround us, Everywhere you go, always take the weather we little islanders are calm and safe, in our with you By contrast, the brisk and bracing Northern pyjamas and tucked up in bed. In the words Everywhere you go, always take the weather. European is ‘a talented animal’ whose natu- of poet Carol Ann Duffy (1993): ral superiority is due to the ‘exciting variety’ ‘Weather with you’, Crowded House, 1992 of his changeable climate. ‘He will invent Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer hard games and delve into all branches of — Rockall, Malin. Dogger. Finisterre. Lately, the weather has been front-page knowledge; he will swim the seas and climb Talking about the weather also means not news. In the UK, we’ve just experienced the mountains and fly to the end of the saying anything about anything at all – it’s one of the warmest and wettest win- earth. And all this will be, to a great extent, just inconsequential chitchat. Which is odd, ters on record. The highest rainfall ever due to the influence of the weather’. really, because as botanist, naturalist and recorded in 24h fell on Cumbria (341.1mm, But enough meteorological eugenic compulsive list-maker Simon Leach (pers. 5 December) and, belying their common- poppycock. The British are also obsessed commun.) points out, ‘The weather is the place names, storms Desmond, Eva and with the weather forecast – and weather context that we all have to live within: it’s Frank left a trail of devastation across the forecasters. TV weatherman John Kettley the backdrop to everything we do, and an north. Birds are nesting early, and spring admitted in a BBC Radio 4 interview recently important factor influencing whether or not flowers are blossoming out of turn. The that he and many of his fellow presenters we enjoy what we’re doing’. strongest El Niño event ever has resulted would get ‘items of clothing’ sent to them in droughts in California and South from fans ’Not knickers, that sort of thing, Africa, and forest fires smouldering across but sweaters…’ he clarified hastily. Kettley, The weather tree keeper Indonesia. Hard on the heels of the COP 21 John Hammond, Michael Fish and their ilk Simon is kneeling down in his living room, climate change conference in Paris, it’s no are viewed almost like members of the fam- showing me the weather trees that he has wonder that people are looking at the sky ily, who appear every evening in the living made. These are posters, a little larger than and wondering how much of this is down rooms of millions of homes, with their pat- A1, showing the outline of a tree with twelve to human activity and worrying about our terned ties and reassuring predictions that branches, one for each month of the year, long-term forecasts. occasionally even turn out to be right. and there are leaves on each branch, each As someone who has only recently moved These little islands are chock full of land- representing a day. There are 19 of them, one back to England after two decades of living lubbers who wouldn’t know ‘a freighter from for every year since 1997 (Figure 1). There’s a with the very different weather patterns of a futtock’, as journalist Philip Reeves (2013) key in one corner, but no fixed rules about northern India, I’ve been fascinated by how puts it, and yet who harbour an intense what colour scheme you should use. ‘Most our lives and our temperaments are shaped and irrational love of the shipping forecast. people that I know who keep weather trees by the climate. The English are forever This daily round-up of weather conditions use blue for rain, whereas I tend to use blue talking about the weather; it’s almost our on the seas around Great Britain has been for snow because I associate blue with cold. national characteristic. As Samuel Johnson broadcast across the country for over a hun- Rain is green because it’s the rain that makes put it, back in 1758, ‘When two Englishmen dred years, with only three interruptions: the grass grow!’ he explains. Starting with meet, their first talk is of the weather’. during the two World Wars and once, on 20 January in the bottom left, the tree’s plain For the architects of Empire, the weather May 2014, due to a technical glitch at the white leaves accrue their colours clockwise was key: it was the making of man. According BBC (the latter provoking an outcry almost as, every day, before brushing his teeth and to the Wonderful World of Knowledge ency- severe enough to have set off World War III). going to bed, Simon takes out his special clopedia (Ogan, 1933) ‘Climate has a great In his book, And Now the Shipping Forecast, pencils (used only and specifically for this deal to do with character’. It dubs the tribal Peter Jefferson – who read the forecast for purpose) and colours in a leaf. peoples of the Amazon ‘the pampered dar- 40 years until 2009 – tries to account for its The section nearest the petiole, the leaf lings of our great Mother Earth’: appeal: ‘There is something in many of us stalk, is the early part of the day, and the 142 Always take the weather with you Weather – June 2016, Vol. 71, No. 6

Figure 1. 2003 weather tree. (Source: Simon Leach.)

143 each day’s weather. The diary petered out as the snow thawed and everything returned to normal!’ He shows me the book, with its iconic cover of a windmill standing proud beneath a wide blue sky full of white cumulonim- bus clouds (Figure 3). Along with the classic Ladybird What to Look For series (Figure 4), this was the book that triggered his lifelong interest in the natural world, his first (and only) childhood diary: the seed that, thirty- four years later, would grow into his first Always take the weather with you the weather take Always weather tree. As a scientist, Simon is aware that his trees are of limited use as a dataset. While the uniform colours and style make them visually easy to compare with each other, the lack of hard and fast rules about how to fill them in makes one person’s trees difficult to compare with someone else’s. Simon’s trees record the weather that hap- Figure 2. April 2015. (Source: Simon Leach.) pens in Taunton, Somerset (when he’s not there to experience it in person, he has to

Weather – June 2016, Vol. 71, No. 6 71, No. Vol. – June 2016, Weather get someone to ‘weather tree sit’). A friend weather is recorded in bands or spots or Simon’s sons’ cricket match scores, going of his used her weather tree to record the triangles of colour until night falls at the out to dinner with friends, ‘carnival,’ ‘space tip. A grey leaf with zigzags of yellow means walk’ and ‘apple day’. Mostly, these prompt predominantly cloudy with patches of sun- associative memories to flood out, but shine. Solid green indicates steady rainfall, occasionally they stay solidly cryptic. Simon whereas a green polka dot pattern means points to an annotation next to a 1999 leaf: spit-spots or drizzle. Where there’s a ‘heat- ‘ “Cement.” What on earth does that mean? wave’ (temperatures over 25°C) the leaf is he says, squinting,’ ‘I haven’t got a clue.’ outlined in pillarbox red, and where there’s He also uses the tree to record phenologi- frost, it’s rimmed with purple. A windy day cal data – the first flowering of primrose and (6 or above on the Beaufort Scale) is marked dog’s mercury; hazel catkins; horse-chestnut with three little black triangles joined at the and blackthorn bud-burst; the first singing leaf tip. On many days, the leaves are anno- great tits and blackcaps; murmurations of tated with figures showing maximum and starlings on the Somerset Levels; the first minimum temperatures. bumblebees, brimstones and orange-tip Each of the trees, therefore, is similar butterflies; the arrival of swifts and swal- – bluey-green around its lower (winter) lows. On his local patch, Simon maintains branches, shading to predominantly yellow annual records of first-flowering dates for and red around the summer months at more than 300 plant species, while he also the top. You can also pick out days with helped with a pilot project that resulted in similar sorts of weather as easily as pick- a massive scheme to crowd-source phe- ing out a Twenty20 cricket team by the nological data via the internet. Nature’s colours of their kit. The trees bristle with Calendar was launched by the Woodland neat black handwriting where Simon has Trust in 2000 and now has over 50 000 con- added details to supplement the colour- tributors from all over the British Isles.1 ‘It code: ‘stormy evening’ or ‘V. hot!’ or ‘sleet/ captured people’s imagination’, says project wet snow in night’. Often these annotations, manager Jill Attenborough. ‘We are seeing tucked into the spaces between the leaves more and more unusual weather. People Figure 3. Ladybird Book of the Weather (front cover, Source: Simon Leach). and connected with snaking arrows, fit that want to know why these things are hap- day’s weather into a larger pattern: 2015, pening – why are my roses blooming in for instance, had the ‘sunniest April since November, or why am I seeing a butterfly records began (1929)’ (Figure 2) and many in December?’ (Quoted in Petrie, 2009.) such other high points dot the trees over Simon is an obsessive keeper of records, the years: ‘volcanic ash from Iceland’ in 2010 but has never really kept a diary, ‘Except for for example. The December branch from the one year. I was given this book, the Ladybird most recent tree is a very different colour to Book of the Weather for Christmas in 1962, that of 2010, when almost every leaf was at the start of that really cold winter. And in purple-rimmed with frost. Comparing April the New Year I began a diary, focusing on 2012 – which was the wettest on record, with extensive floods across the southwest 1The Royal Meteorological Society was behind – with other years, you can immediately see the original establishment of a national network what an unusual month it was. of phenological recorders from 1847 to 1947. Along with the weather-related annota- More on this and the history of phenology can Figure 4. Ladybird ‘What to look for’ series 144 tions are jottings of a more personal nature: be found at: http://www.naturescalendar.org.uk (Source: Anita Roy.) weather wherever she happened to be. ‘One Christmas time. ‘Grandparents like to buy our emotional weather as we do for the year, she went to Malawi for a couple of them as gifts for their kids; we get a lot of stuff that’s going on outside, describing months in the autumn, so she had what orders from schools, too’. As one of their someone as having a ‘gloomy’ or ‘sunny’ would have been, in my colour scheme, longest-standing customers, Simon Leach disposition, feeling ‘under the weather’ and Always take the weather with you yellow leaves with red outlines all through also originally started a tree as something going around ‘under a cloud’. Finding in the October and November’. He wonders briefly that his young sons would do – but it rapidly weather the echo of our internal state of what an Indian weather tree would look like became ‘dad’s thing’. mind: ‘Il pleut dans la ville comme il pleut – not just more reds and yellows, but the Perhaps recognising that her target audi- dans mon coeur’, that sort of thing. Or, as leaves far more uniform than his variegated ence tended to be adults rather than chil- Crowded House sang, ‘Everywhere you go, English foliage, with its telltale zigzags of dren, Dorothy branched out (as it were), always take the weather with you’. sunshine and showers. suggesting that her One-Day-At-A-Time trees But it’s not just how you feel: the weather What the trees don’t really tell you about could be used for all sorts of things: from affects how you think. Although you might is climate change: they represent too small weight loss (Chart of the Lessening of the suppose that sunny days would make you and too personal a dataset. ‘What would Girth, perhaps?) to recovery from bereave- brighter, the opposite appears to be true. be really fascinating is if somebody had ment, amount of exercise taken, daily profit In an experiment on shoppers in Sydney, Weather – June 2016, Vol. 71, No. 6 done this a hundred years ago for twenty in a small business, eggs laid by hens, time Australia, researchers discovered that bad years, and you could compare one forest of spent practising an instrument, or to record weather actually sharpens the mind. Shown trees with another forest 100 years hence, the ups and downs of quitting smoking. and asked to recall a tray full of random he enthuses. I suppose my hope would The appeal of weather trees is similar to trinkets, shoppers exhibited markedly bet- be that somebody will do something like that of adult colouring books – an entire ter mental acuity on dull rainy days than this in a hundred years’ time and then you genre that has suddenly mushroomed in when it was sunny. Social psychologist could put the two sets together and begin the past few years. It’s artistic, but you don’t Adam Alter, who describes the results in his to get a sense of how the climate must have have to be ‘arty’. It’s resolutely low-tech and book Drunk Tank Pink (Alter, 2013), puts it changed between those two time periods.’ offline, reconnecting you to the ‘real world’. down to the fact that ‘humans are biologi- It’s meditative and mindful, demanding cally predisposed to avoid sadness… they focus and attention to detail. Perhaps all respond to sad moods by seeking opportu- One leaf at a time the grown-ups who buy weather trees for nities for mood repair… In contrast, happi- The weather trees being filled in by Simon their kids hope that, by linking an activity to ness sends a signal that everything is fine, Leach were created by naturalist and artist observation, it will sharpen children’s aware- the environment doesn’t pose an imminent Dorothy Thelwall. A little more than thirty ness of the natural world. Cocooned inside threat, and there’s no need to think deeply years ago she came across a book by an our centrally heated or air-conditioned lit- and carefully‘. The spotless mind, it appears, American woman who travelled through tle boxes, the daily ups and downs of the really is one of eternal sunshine. rural China in the 1920s. In it, the author weather have relatively little effect on what Back in his house in Taunton, Simon Leach – Nora Waln – describes a Chart of the we do, how we dress or what we eat. The brings out a curious old-fashioned contrap- Lessening of the Cold that was used to record trees on the back of the door, or tacked up tion in a glass-sided box. At one end is a coil the changing of the seasons and helped in on the wall, remind us of the ones in the of flattened metal connected by a series of planning and managing planting, harvest- park that we used to climb as children and levers and spindles to a large brass drum at ing and general farm work. yearn for our children to do so again. the other. A thin steel arm, tipped with an At its simplest, this consisted of eighty-one ‘The Chinese count wood as the fifth circles, in groups of nine, each circle sub- element,’ writes Roger Deakin, ‘and Jung divided into four, with a small circle in the considered trees an archetype. Nothing middle like a target. The circles were then can compete with these larger-than-life shaded to indicate whether the weather had organisms for signalling the changes in the been cloudy (top) or fair (bottom), windy natural world. They are our barometers of (left) or rainy (right) or if it had snowed (bull’s the weather and the changing seasons.’ eye). But just as the modern weather tree We tell the time of year by them (Deakin, has evolved from scientific table to work of 2007). Weather trees, like those coloured in art, so too the Chinese chart had its more by Simon Leach and his tribe, remind us decorative form: ‘The more highly educated, to look up, to look away from our screens with some skill with the brush, trace a deco- and go outside, if only for the sole purpose rative design of a branch of prunus (plum) of coming back inside and reaching for our with eighty-one five-petalled blossoms. One colouring pencils. of these is tinted each day in imitation of a Simon Leach also points out that while tablet at Si An… [that] shows an engraved weather trees are not strictly speaking very vase holding a nine-branched tree of plum, scientific, they do provide a corrective to each bearing nine flowers.’ (Waln, 1934). people’s often inaccurate perceptions of the Inspired by Waln’s account, Dorothy weather. Thelwall’s first weather trees were hand- ‘When people grumble, ‘We haven’t had a drawn for her own children. ‘She filled it in summer this year’ or ‘It’s been raining non- every day until she passed away in 2013’, her stop for weeks’, I’ve got the evidence that it daughter Sarah tells me. In the early 1980s, has not been like that, that we did indeed she decided to sell her blank weather trees have a summer. It’s just that people forget; commercially, initially through the National and when they recall what the weather was Trust, and then through her website (http:// like, they’re prone to paint a much blacker www.weathertree.com). Her husband, David, picture than it really was‘. tells me he still sends out between 500 and The weather really does affect how you Figure 5. Simon Leach with his mother’s 700 weather trees a year – especially around feel. We tend to use the same terms for barograph. (Source: Anita Roy.) 145 annotation: his mother’s birthday. ‘She died in 1979,’ he says, looking at the leaf. In 2014 she would have been 100. The weather tree in the Thelwall family home remains incomplete. ‘The 2013 poster stopped being filled in the day Mum died. I see it as the moment the clock stopped’, says her daughter (Figure 6). The weather tree reminds us of days gone by, of loved ones lost, but perhaps most importantly of something we keep forget- ting: that life’s barometer is always set to Always take the weather with you the weather take Always ‘change’, and that our own season on earth is also brief.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Simon Leach for his invaluable help in preparing this article. Also to Sarah and David Thelwall, for sharing their memo- ries of Dorothy. If you would like to start your own weather tree, posters can be ordered from http://www.weathertree.com. Weather – June 2016, Vol. 71, No. 6 71, No. Vol. – June 2016, Weather

References Alter A. 2013. Drunk tank pink: and other unexpected forces that shape how we think, feel, and behave. Penguin Books: London. Deakin R. 2007. Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees. Hamish Hamilton: London. Duffy CA. 1993. Prayer. Mean time. Anvil Press: London. Jefferson P. 2011. And Now the Shipping Forecast: The Tide of History Around our Shores. UIT Cambridge, UK. Ogan E. (ed.) 1933. Wonderland of Knowledge III. Odhams Press: London. Petrie R. (ed.) 2009. Notes from the Garden, Volume 271. Guardian Books: London. Reeves P. 2013. The Shipping Forecast: from Britain’s seas into its soul. http://www. npr.org/2013/12/16/249722733/the- Figure 6. Dorothy Thelwall’s original weather tree, 2013. (Source: Sarah Thelwall.) shipping-forecast-from-britains-seas-into- its-soul (accessed 15 December 2015). Waln N. 1934. The House of Exile. Little, Brown & Co.: New York, NY. ink-fed needle, leaves a trail on the graph charts, each carefully dated in his mother’s paper wrapped around the drum (Figure 5). handwriting. The one on the drum is for ‘It’s a barograph,’ he explains. ‘It belonged the week beginning 6 November 1963. ‘That Correspondence to: Anita Roy to my mum. Records atmospheric pressure.’ was just before my eighth birthday – same [email protected] He pulls on a little wooden knob at the vintage as the Ladybird books.’ © 2016 Royal Meteorological Society front, and out slides a drawer, cunningly On his weather tree of 2014, the leaf for concealed in the base. It is full of weekly 2 December is marked with a rather special doi:10.1002/wea.2727

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