94 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
METEOROLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS AT WISLEY, 1916. 
By R. H. Curtis, F.R.H.S. 
The weather of 191 6, regarded from a gardener's point of view, 
was by no means ideal. Taking a broad retrospect, it was cold and 
wet, with a marked deficiency of bright sunshine, and with more strong 
winds and gales than are usually experienced. The outstanding 
climatic features of the year are shown graphically in figs. 30-33 ; and 
especially in fig. 30, where the coolness of the two mid-summer months, 
June and July, is strikingly exhibited by the deep drop of the tempera- 
ture line below the normal ; whilst fig. 31 shows that in June the normal 
march of temperature was reversed, and the mean for the month was 
actually, as well as relatively, lower than that of May. Gales were 
most frequent in the early and late months of the year, but by far 
the most serious to horticulturists was that which occurred at the end 
of March, when over all the southern counties of England much damage 
was caused to trees, whose branches, already heavily weighted by 
clinging snow, were carried away by the violent squalls ; or the tree 
was entirely up-rooted and destroyed. Fig. 30 also shows that whilst 
the year began with an unusual amount of warmth, the mean tem- 
perature in January having been more than six degrees above the 
normal, it closed with a nearly equal departure from the mean in the 
opposite direction, the December mean temperature being nearly 
six degrees below the normal. The figure also shows that the unusual 
wetness of the year was chiefly due to the excessive falls of rain in the 
second and third, and the tenth and eleventh months ; the falls in 
the other eight months varied only by small amounts from their 
averages, and the mean for the whole eight was fairly normal. 
The chief features of the weather of the several months were as 
follows : 
January. — The year opened with a southerly to westerly gale, which 
blew for several hours with more than usual violence over the whole of 
the United Kingdom. This gale was the first of a series, all of which 
travelled slowly along an easterly path, well to the north of the British 
Isles, and caused an almost continuous succession of strong westerly 
winds, and with them a persistently high temperature, and the mildest 
January experienced over Great Britain for very many years. January 
is the mid-winter month, and generally the coldest month of the year ; 
but on this occasion there was practically no winter ; no snow fell, 
and the few frosts which occurred were slight and of brief duration. 
The result of this unusual warmth was very manifest in the Gardens, 
the spring flowers opening in an extraordinary way — early Rhodo- 
dendrons, Anemones, Narcissi, Scillas, Saxifrages, Primroses, Violets, 
Snowdrops, Irises, and very many others, blooming quite early in 
