Warming Up To The U.K. - The Bad Way
If you live in the English countryside as I do, then you can consign those traditional Christmas card views of stage coaches making their way down snow covered roads back to the world of fiction.
Where I live, those endless arguments between well-meaning scientists over whether or not global warming really is or isn't making an impact, seem pretty irrelevant. This year in the county of Devon in England's beautiful South-West, we'll have a third crop of hay, and sheep will be lambing at Christmas for the first time that I can remember.
Mike Pring, whose family have farmed across the way from me for generations and who milks two hundred Holstein cattle twice a day, told me that his biggest worry this winter is the damage that can be caused to his cows by summer bugs. Bugs that used to be dead and gone by October. And now our Royal Horticultural Society has put the final nail in the coffin of all those well-meaning souls who claim that global warming is a myth, by announcing the death of the pride of England, the Country Cottage Garden.
This summer has seen the usual explosion of colour from beds of Lupins, Camilias, Wallflowers and Delphiniums, surrounding crisp cottage lawns, crisply cut and glowing green. But hotter, drier summers, wetter warmer winters and earlier springs will mean that gradually over the next few years, the glorious cottage garden will shrivel and burn. And in the future, the lupins and lawns will be replaced by bland, sub-tropical palms and olives.
Whether we like it or not, over the next few decades, ours will become a Mediterranean landscape, more like California than Cornwall. Figures just released by our tourist people say that most of you Americans who cross the pond stay in London and rarely stray for more than a day trip out to the countryside.
So next summer, grab the chance to see the likes of Polsdon Lacy, Sowerby and Penzance. Go look at those proudly kept gardens that Shakespeare and Wordsworth knew, before they vanish forever.
by Simon Bates