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Predicting your summer weather - it’s all in the leaves

May 13th, 2007

How to predict your summer weather?

Obviously it isn’t an exact science predicting the weather - check out any weather site - WeatherOnline.co.uk is the best I’ve come across (it has loads of weather information from virtually every weather service on the planet) - and you will find lots of different forecasts giving lots of predictions. Seldom is one prediction from one service the same as another’s!

So how do you go about predicting what type of summer you will have in your local area?

The answer is in the leaves. Not tea-leaves, the gypsy fortune-telling method but rather the leaves of the plants in your own garden.

Here’s the method.

Find a plant in your garden that is evergreen. If you know what size of leaf a deciduous plant normally has, you can use that instead but for now let’s stick to plants that keep their leaves all year round.

Here’s a snap of a pyracantha, a thorny evergreen shrub, in my garden showing new growth.

So how does this tell what the summer will be like?

Simple, really. It’s all to do with the size of the new leaves. The bigger the new leaves, the better the summer will be.

Here’s a comparison shot of a new leaf that has grown this year and an older leaf from several years back.

Note the huge difference is leaf dimensions. The one on the right is a new leaf that has grown this year.

The huge leaf means the summer will generally be a hot, dry one, locally, where I live in Scotland.

Entry Filed under: Mildly Interesting