210 
JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. 
[ March 18, 1886. 
The weather has continued dull and cloudy during the past week, a keen 
north-easterly wind prevailing generally. Green vegetables are rising to 
extravagant prices, and no progress in sowing for spring crops can as yet 
he made. 
At a meeting of the Royal Botanic Society held on Saturday last, 
Mr. W. Y. Low in the chair, Mr. C. Schoell was elected a Fellow of the 
Society, and the names of several others read for ballot at the next meet¬ 
ing. There was exhibited at the meeting a series of charts from the 
Society’8 Sunshine Recorder, from which it appears that the total of sun¬ 
light registered during February was no more than seventeen hours, or 
less than one-fifteenth. During March, however, only two days as yet 
have been sunless. Mr. G. J. Symons, F.R.S., gave some remarks upon 
the severity of the recent weather. He pointed out that the mean 
temperature of every week this year at Greenwich had been below the 
average, and as much as 7° or more below in several of them. Mr. 
Symons exhibited a diagram representing the temperature at 1 foot below 
the surface for each day this year, which showed that from January 1st it 
had almost continually fallen until the present date, and is now 11° colder 
than on the corresponding date in 1882. Moreover, the temperature at 
3 feet below the ground, 33'4°, is as low as at 1 foot, showing a penetra¬ 
tion of low temperature extremely unusual, and due solely to the per¬ 
sistency of the low temperature, for no short frost has ever produced 
such an effect. In the discussion upon the effects of the extreme cold 
upon vegetation which followed. Mr. H. S. Manning said there was every 
reason to hope that by retarding the flowering season of our fruit trees 
the cold would benefit agriculture. 
March, 1866, up to this date (9th) will be long remembered in this 
part of Derbyshire for its extreme coldness. The following temperatures 
were registered in the kitchen gardens during the past few days :— 
March 4th, at 7 A.M., 27° of frost; 5th, 26° ; 6th, 18°; 7th, 34° ; 8th, 26° ; 
9th, 12°.— Owen Thomas, Chatmorth Gardens. 
The wintry weather is becoming with us a somewhat serious matter. 
We have still, as we have had for a long time, a considerable depth of 
snow, covering everything and preventing all ground work. Green 
vegetables have almost entirely disappeared and cannot be replaced for a 
long time to come. There is still no sign of the cold weather leaving us. 
Our thermometer at its lowest point a week ago was down to 10°. At 
Wakefield it appears to have been even more severe than with us, and 
I am told they have a greater depth of snow.—W. K. Woodcock, 
Sheffield. 
The lowest point registered here each night between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. 
from Maroh 6th was as follows :—Friday morning, 9° above zero, 23° of 
frost; Saturday, 7°, 25°; Sunday, 5°, 27°; Monday, 1°, 31°; Tuesday, 
11°, 21°; Wednesday, 11°, 21°. We are getting well into the fourth month 
that the lakes here have never been clear of ice.— Fredk. Taylor, The 
Shrubbery Lodge , Welheck Abbey, Worksop. 
All who take an interest—and who do not ?—in the state of the 
weather must be struck with the severe aspect it has assumed since the 
beginning of the present year. Nor does it as yet give signs of relaxing 
its grip—24° of frost on the morning of yesterday and 14° to-day, the 
ground covered with snow, in many places as deep as the dykes are high. 
Farmers, especially Highland sheep farmers, are to be deeply commise¬ 
rated for the enormous cost they have been obliged to incur to save their 
stock from perishing, and the nation generally must suffer severely in 
its best interest unless we get an immediate and radical change of 
weather. From such signs as are at all reliable, I fear this prospect is 
not well founded. In our latitudes we are, as is well known, very depen¬ 
dent for the genial and growing warmth of our climate on the influence 
of the Gulf Stream. Scientists have proved that this influence has varied 
at different periods of the earth’s history from little to much, and I fear 
there are indications that it is going in the former direction at the present 
date. For twenty years we have not had more than three thoroughly 
genial, warm, growing summers—such weather as leads to the produc¬ 
tion of full agricultural crops both as to quantity and quality, I appeal 
to farmers to say if in this I am wrong. Thirty to fifty years ago we had 
bad seasons, but they were the exception then ; they are the rule now, 
and good ones the exception. Low as the prices of agricultural produce 
are, and heavy as this must bear on the prosperity of agriculture, the 
position is greatly aggravated by a diminution of at least one-third of 
■what, under more favourable circumstances as to weather, should have 
been the return from the soil. This has more to do with the present 
dullness of trade than is generally suspected. So much for the past. 
What of the immediate future ? I confess that I do not think the prospect 
bright. Men who have made the subject a study show that our part of 
Europe derives one-third of the warmth of its climate from the warm 
water of the Gulf Stream and two-thirds from the sun. The sun is likely 
to do his duty as of old, but I fear the Stream is failing in its per¬ 
formance. 
The circulation of the water of the ocean known as the Gulf Stream 
is great or less in proportion to the difference of temperature of the water 
at the Equator and the Arctic Circle. Now, during the present winter 
the weather has not been exceptionally cold in the Arctic regions from a 
normal point of view, while it has been exceptionally cold, for instance, in 
the neighbourhood of the Gulf of Mexico, from which quarter the warm 
water of the Gulf Stream proceeds across the Atlantic to our shores, by its 
influence both mitigating the severity of our climate and adding by its 
humid warmth to the pro luce of our soil. When the waters of the 
Equator are very warm and those of the Arctic Circle very cold, the rush 
of the warm Stream in our direction will be greater, and vice versa. The 
denser cold water of the Arctic by its gravity falls into the Gulf of Mexico 
under the warm water, and, so to speak, pushes it out, compelling it to 
come across the Atlantic and occupy the space it has left—exactly guided 
by the same law which makes heating by hot water with boiler and pipes 
possible. Now, what are the prospects that this circulation will be defec¬ 
tive this summer ? The first is that there has been some defect in the 
case of the boiler—the Gulf of Mexico—for in its own immediate neigh¬ 
bourhood there have been severe frosts ; the Oranges frozen on the trees, 
and the trees that have stood a hundred years killed in Florida ; in New 
Orleans, men frozen to death and trains stopped by snow. This is cold 
unprecedented there, and if this was so on land, it is fair to infer that 
the sea came under the same influences; consequently we cannot expect 
so liberal a flood of warm water from that quarter as if the winter there 
had shown no abnormal signs ; and in the second place, there is no reason 
to suppose that the water of the Arctic Circle is abnormally cold at 
present. 
I, however, sincerely hope I may be mistaken, and that in spite of 
appearances we may have one good, genial, old-fashioned summer, giving 
us a bountiful harvest, which I believe will do more to revive the drooping 
interest of Europe than mere legislation can.— Wm. Thomson, Cloven¬ 
fords, March S, 1886 (in the Scotsman). 
This season will long be noted, and for years no doubt will be referred 
to, not on account of any extreme severe frosts, for we have had no zero 
records this winter, but for the long-continued cold weather which with 
frosts have prevailed more or less since last October. There has not been 
above two nights here since the new year that the thermometer has not 
fallen below freezing point; that was the last week in January, when no 
doubt many others beside myself took the opportunity to get in the 
earliest crops of Peas, Beans, and Spinach. It is doubtful whether these 
would not have been as well out of the ground, for ever since that time 
we have had a continuation of cold weather with snow and frosts ranging 
from 2° to 20° every night, and only on bright days, when the sun now 
has sufficient power to caupe the temperature to rise above freezing point 
—although it has been freezing hard in the shade—has there been the 
least relaxation, and as I write (March 15th) there is not the least sign of 
a change for the better, the wind still blowing keenly from the north¬ 
east. 
This has been a trying winter for gardeners, and many have felt the 
ill effects of it. To what extent the more tender shrubs and plants have 
suffered will not be discerned until later in the spring. In the kitchen 
garden we are feeling the more immediate effects. Vegetables are now at 
a premium, anything in the way of Sprouts or Greens selling readily at 
3d. or 4d. per lb. at the greengrocers. Spring Cabbage plants are disap¬ 
pearing from the beds, and I am afraid there will be very few left alive, 
and what there is is much smaller than they were in November. 
Winter Lettuces are gone or going, the hardy Brown Cos alone struggling 
for existence, and Winter Spinach and other vegetables are in the same 
condition. Those who have taken the precaution to sow some early 
varieties of vegetables in boxes and placed in gentle heat, ready for 
pricking off into other boxes or frames when large enough, will find the 
benefit presently. Such varieties as Ellam’s Early Cabbage, Early 
Forcing Cauliflower, Early Paris Market Lettuce, a little Spinach sown 
in 60-pots and placed in a cold frame, American Wonder, or Veitch’s 
Selected Early Pea, and a few Early Mazagan Broad Beans, should be 
sown on strips of turf and placed in a slight heat, to be hardened and 
planted out when the weather is favourable. I should advise those who 
have not already done so to lose no time, and thus try to tide over 
the emergency, for I am afraid there will be many gaps in the early-sown 
out-of-door seeds this spring. 
Though we despair when looking at our losses, or frown at the want 
of sun for early forcing, and feel grieved at the crippled condition of the 
flowers of the choicer occupants of the house for the want of solar light, 
there is still a bright side to the question. Although the weather has 
been sadly against those who have had landscape work or alterations in 
the shape of turf-laying or shrub-moving or planting to do, we have not 
had such a season for years for wheeling or carting manure on land, and 
for shrubbery cleaning, as we have had this winter ; and many an old 
rubbish corner or shrubbery, I venture to state, has been cleaned out, 
that has been neglected during the last few open winters, and the land 
no doubt will reap the benefit of it. Everything at the present time is as 
backward as in the first week in January, no signs of life in anything 
except the Snowdrops and Winter Aconites, a Crocus or two in the more 
sheltered places, a stray flower or two of Seilla siberica and Primulas 
out of doors, so with an ordinary run we may look hopefully forward to a 
good fruit season, as the flower buds are kept back safely at the present 
time. 
To show the disparity between two seasons within a year of each other 
I append a few notes that were made by me on March the 16tb, 1884, 
showing the condition of plants out of doors at that time after an ex¬ 
ceptionally mild winter. They may be of interest to some of your readers. 
This was noted as the Apple year, when the Apple Congress was held. 
The whole winter months very mild, open and dry ; the previous day 
soft, mild breeze with sunshine. This day thermometer 75° in the sun 
(at night ten o’clock thermometer 50° temperature). Gloire de Dijon on 
the house has been in flower the whole winter, and is just shedding the 
last blossoms ; Clematis montana on the lodge is throwing out foliage and 
flower buds, the first buds just opening ; Lilacs are showing bloom on the 
