Global Worming?

Talk to most people, not just gardeners, and when the subject of the seasons comes up (if you wait long enough and run out of other things to talk about) somebody will invariably say 'changes are happening earlier in the year'. It's become almost a religious chant among the gardening fraternity and this weekend I saw three clear examples.

Bank Holiday Monday produced the best weather of the holiday period, sunny, warm and the winds dropped for a couple of hours so it was out into the garden to plant some heather around the waterfall and tidy up. In the process I disturbed a toad, two slugs and a selection of worms.

Now I'm not to bothered about the slugs, other than the fact that at least the toad will have some food if he looks hard enough - but the toad really shouldn't be awake yet. Male frogs, of which we have plenty, should be waking up in a week or two but the problem will occur if we have a cold spell, as happened last year, at the end of January/start of Feb and all the spawn is killed off.

The other side to the global warming debate is that I don't have any bulbs pushing throw the ground yet - last year I had tulip bulbs on Boxing Day, but I do have green shoots on the wigella and honeysuckle and on Saturday Nathalie and Janis saw a butterfly in the garden.

I'm not sure where I stand on the whole global warming debate but there are signs that in some areas things are being brought forward whilst others, such as the bulbs, seem to have reverted to type.