The thermometer reads 19°C. According to some calendars, today is the first day of spring. I'm sitting in a deckchair, admiring a set of rampant tall peas which have germinated so well they look as if they might want to audition for part in Jack and The Beanstalk. So tall have they become that I've been forced to transplant them into their final position. Tonight they'll be tucked up in straw and covered with a sheet of thermal fleece. I'm pinching myself. Can summer really be here? It is time to get out the seed trays and start planting with gusto?
Of course, I know that tomorrow we could get a frost. I know that despite today's sunshine, that by the end of the week a snowstorm might have blown in from Iceland or Russia. But, like sighting a rainbow, the first balmy days of the year seem to me like a heavenly portend. Winter has come to an end. Spring has sprung. Summer will be soon.
I'm reminded of how late the spring was last year and how my walks in a leafless park became more and more depressing. What would it have felt like if summer had never arrived?
Nowadays, we have such technology to fall back on, the nation would probably be able to survive a failed season or two. But even in our modern world, we'd surely start to pine when the English Apples ran out; when potatoes rocketed in price; when all we had to eat were tinned carrots instead of fresh ones. How long would it be before we started blaming the government, or God, or the devil?
This winter's flooding has shown us that, despite all our civilisation and scientific knowledge, we are still vulnerable to climatic disasters. The predictions are that such erratic events will become more and more common, as climate change starts to bite. I'm sorry to be doomful, but some time soon we may get a climate change induced disaster, more terrible than the flooding we've seen this winter. This winter the jetstream moved. The USA and Canada was gripped by snow for weeks on end. In some places it hasn't melted yet.
These massive climatic leaps are not new to our planet. A few weeks ago, I blogged about gardening in Roman London. During the latter part of the Roman occupation of Britain we experienced particularly warm summers. The market gardens fringing the city of London, where I now live, would have been verdant and productive. Grape vines would have flourishes. Orchards of sweet apples, a Roman import, quite unlike the sour British 'crab' apples that we had before, would have cropped prodigiously. People were lulled into a false sense of security.
The traditional view is that as soon as the legions left, civilised life collapsed. However recent archaeology has called all this into question. It seems that the walled capital of Londinium was not abandoned. People continued to live there throughout the dark ages.
The legionaries were not in fact removed at all. Rome just stopped paying them. In London as least some of the garrison were Germanic in origin. By the end of the occupation, by the early part of the fourth century AD, these legionaries may have been living in Britain for several generations. They would have married local girls, had families and settled. All across Britain we find evidence of Roman villas and villages attesting to the spread of cultivated society. The Roman world stood apart because of its sophistication, people could read and write, they attended plays and sporting events, they listened to music, they spouted poetry, they understood history and the rudiments of science. But in the cultivation of plants they were also sophisticated. That sophistication did not leave us when the Roman coffers ran dry. When Rome stopped paying its troops, some of them might have made their way home. But it is likely that many people stayed put.
Overnight the Roman soldiers would have had to find other ways of making money. It is not hard to imagine that some of them would have turned their hands to market gardening. Even in a time of crisis, everyone still needs to eat.
After the Romans left, a thriving Saxon town built up outside the Roman city walls. More wharfs were built, extending west of the city along what we now call The Strand. The metropolis began creeping towards us here in Great Titchfield Street. The new Saxon settlement of Londonwick was centred around Covent Garden, extending as far north as Tottenham Court Road. It sat on a bluff of land protecting it from the marshy foreshore. Londonwick would certainly have bustled, like a city, but to us, today, it would have had little of the Roman refinement that required slaves and legions to build in stone and marble. Londonwick would have felt more like an encampment.
Anyone who farmed in my part of the city, over that period, would have seen the tide of urban development edging closer to them. I wonder if my street remained a rural idyll after Rome declined. Would Saxon kids have walked up here on autumn days to steal apples or pull blackberries from the hedgerows? I wonder if Teutonic legionaries might have set up farms growing crops their forebears would have recognised like turnips and swedes, grains and kales. Would pigs have rooted in the orchards? Would Germanic butchers have turned them into wursts, and pies to sell in the criss-cross of streets called The Oxford Market, at the bottom of our road?
Personally I don't think that it was the decline of the Roman Empire that set our civilisation tumbling into the dark ages. I think it was the events of 535–536, approximately 100 years after the Romans had ceased to rule, that led to our downfall.
The winter of 535 was a harsh one. That was not so strange. Harsh winters have been known from time immemorial. But they had always been followed by spring. In 536, spring failed to appear. Right across the world the extreme cold continued into February, March, April and May without any change to the season. There are theories that connect this climate change disaster with the downfall of empires and the mass migration of peoples. Even the rise of Islam and the growth of Christianity can be pinpointed to this period of history. Clouds refused to disperse, people reported that the sun seemed to be in permanent eclipse. Summer never arrived. Chroniclers reported deep snow in China in August, drought in Peru and the failure of the grain harvest in Ireland for four years. Seeds refused to germinate, livestock died, the milk dried up, crops failed. People began to sicken. Plague arrived on our shores. The population would have plummeted. Organisations would have crumbled. Roman order would have dissolved into disorder.
People turned to religion, or which-craft. In fact, the catastrophic weather is now thought to have been caused by dust from a volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora in Indonesia. This veiled the atmosphere for months, like a deadly fog. People living in Londonwick would have been baffled and fearful.
Last year the delayed spring began to feel cataclysmic to me. Every day I would take the dog for her morning walk in the park, I would look at the leafless trees and fear that they would never bud. In reality spring was only delayed by a few weeks. I continued to plant tomatoes and chillies, knowing that summer would eventually come.
This year spring has been delightfully early. For a hobby gardener neither scenario is life-changing. But if global warming means that the gulf stream fails, or if the jet-stream permenantly moves out of position, we could find our islands subjected to the same climate as eastern seaboards. London is on the same latitude as Labrador. It is only the influence of the gulf stream and breezes from the tropics that saves us from an equally harsh climate.
People of the fifth Century AD, did not have the scientific knowledge that we have now. But there are still many who would prefer to see climatic change as an act of God, rather than man-made. For my ancestors farming on the same spot where now I grow, the year of 536, the year that summer never arrived, must have been inexplicable. For them it must have, quite literally, presaged the dark ages.
Thank goodness for Spring. Let's hope that summer never fails us again.
