Introduction

This section is designed to inform walkers in the south east about what is around them in the natural world throughout the year.

If you are new to nature spotting, there is a Beginner's Guide with tips on how to get started, and a guide to Nature Books that can help you identify what you see. The Week by Week section gives you a brief nature spotting tip for throughout the year.

The monthly pages then go into much more detail. The Weather sections on these pages are a whimsical attempt to reduce the chaos of the English weather to some kind of pattern (see section below). The Nature Notes, which now include photo links, are designed to tell you everything that you can see in the countryside in that particular month. This hopefully will help you narrow your search when identifying a new flower or birdsong.

Learning to identify flowers or birdsong takes a bit of work, and like all learning processes takes a bit of persistence. But it really is worth it. Once you know what you are looking at, every country walk becomes full of interest. Your eyes are opened to the amazing variety of life around you, and you become much more atuned to the changing seasons.

Please note that all the material here is © Peter Conway • All Rights Reserved • From his South East of England Almanac. By all means print for your own reference, but no other form of reproduction is allowed without permission of the author.

If you have any comments on the Nature section of this site, or would like to share observations of your own, feel free to use the comment feature on this page.

An introduction to the English weather

Everyone knows that the English weather is awful. Foreigners are taught this in their first month of English lessons, and so are wedded to the idea. So too are the English themselves. Having terrible weather is part of their national image and if you try and disprove it, they get terribly upset.

In fact the key characteristic of the English weather is that it is changeable. If you had no other method of forecasting the weather, to expect it to be the opposite of what it is now in a week’s time would not be a bad method. If it is a wet spring week, it will probably be all sun and blue sky next week. If we are having a summer heatwave, rain and grey cloud will follow.

In winter it may seem that the weather is always grim, but in fact periods of sunshine and frost are pretty much a dead certainty too. And a February cold snap will be followed by a period when you exclaim how unseasonally warm it is.

Because many have not grasped this simple pattern, the English are in a perpetual state of consternation over their weather. Spring is a particularly good season to see this at work. In one week the conversation can turn from what a cold, wet spring we are having to how early the flowers are coming out this year and how that is a sign of global warming. In summer, one moment it is the wettest summer ever (with pictures in the newspapers of holidaymakers huddling in bus shelters on the seafront in Bournemouth) and the next it is an intolerable heatwave (London hotter than Acapulco!!).

All of this perhaps explains why autumn is such a popular season among the English. Quite apart from the fine colours, the weather in this season can never disappoint. If it is wet and grey, what else do you expect now summer is over? If it is sunny, all the better.

My personal view is that another reason why the seasons perplex us is that there are actually six of them, not four. Winter lasts from mid to late November (the end of leaf fall) to mid February, but then a new season starts - let us call it Awakening - with tentative signs of spring, but still very wintry weather. That lasts till the start of April, when spring proper gets underway - Flowering might be a name for it - until mid June. Then it is Summer till late August, when we get Indian Summer - a time of pleasant sunshine, but no longer hot temperatures. Finally in mid to late October, Leaf Fall is the classic autumn with golden colours everywhere.

This weather sections on the monthly pages on this site are an attempt to shine a light on all this, and to try and make sense of the apparently senseless English weather - at least in London and the South East. They are based on diary records of the weather and other seasonal happenings I have made since 2000.

They draw their inspiration in part to doing the walks of the first Time Out Book of Country Walks from 1998 to 2004, during which period the Saturday Walkers Club did the same walks on the same weekends each year. I began to notice that such and such a walk in January was often sunny while another in October nearly always had rain, making me wonder if there was some deeper pattern.

Lastly, I am curious to see if there is, in fact, any change in the weather patterns due to global warming. If so, the future could bring very different seasons to the ones we have now. But whatever happens to the English climate from a new Ice Age to a baking Mediterranean climate, it is a fair bet that we will still be complaining about it.

© Peter Conway 2006 - updated 2007, 2009 • All Rights Reserved • From his South East of England Almanac