This is the latest report from Michael Walter.
Will anyone who has been complaining about the lack of rain for their garden please now shut up, as it seems as though the great tap in the sky has jammed open. It all started on 13th August when we had at least 31.8mm of rain, most of it in the space of an hour. I say “at least” because my rain gauge tilted over under the sheer weight of water and some probably spilled out. Then, just eleven days later we suffered the mother and father of all rain storms, with 70.3mm recorded in 24 hours (my rain gauge was now more firmly anchored in the ground, and did not tip over this time). You probably all have your own stories about the great deluge: I should have been safe on high ground in Rough Common, but that doesn’t allow for the council no longer clearing out its drains. As a result, all the water from Rough Common Road took a left turn into Garden Close, and then straight into my garage and shed. We ended up with a total of 162.5mm for August (or for those who are still more comfortable with imperial measurements, that’s 6.4”). This made it the wettest August in my 34 years of recording at Rough Common, but not by such a great margin as you might imagine, as there had been five Augusts with over 100mm, the previous highest being 139mm in 2006. To put all this in perspective, the long-term average for this month is 55mm. To me what was so surprising was not so much the sheer quantity of rain on 24thas the limited impression it made on the landscape. A small delta of mud and stone was indeed washed out of the wood onto the Rough Common Road but, that apart, there was little sign a few hours later of what had occurred; the main stream did not flood its valley and the wood didn’t turn into an impassable quagmire. This is in marked contrast to when a similar amount of rainemptied onto an unsuspecting wood on 4th April 2000; then, a normally quiescent stream became a raging torrent that would have swept me away had I been foolish enough to attempt to wade through the water that was surging across the top of an overwhelmed culvert. Banks were burst and both footbridges were gently lifted off their moorings, then redeposited a short distance downstream, still spanning the water, but now at a slightly quirky angle. The difference lies in the time of year: even in a wet August the water table is well below the surface (at Blean you would have to dig down over ten metres before there was a chance of water pooling on the floor of your pit), whereas in April, after six months of low temperatures and minimal evaporation, coupled with a dormant woodland whose vegetation isn’t pumping water up stems and out through leaves by the process of transpiration, the ground would have been well and truly sodden, incapable of absorbing all the water from an exceptional storm.
Unsurprisingly, the generally dull August led to the butterfly season fizzling out ignominiously mid-month - a particular shame this yearas there has been an exceptionally good showing of the bluish-mauve devil’s bit scabious. In happier times, when the dying days of summer are blessed with glorious sunshine, these beautiful flowers can be alive with colourful peacocks, commas, red admirals and brimstone butterflies. That was my joyous experience last September, one that, sadly, is not about to be repeated this year.