Trees tell a tale of winter
Nature is amazing. Grandma believed that if you looked closely enough, you could find all sorts of signs of changing weather conditions. When it came to short-term forecasting, Grandma had the magic touch. For long term or seasonal predictions, she often turned to the trees for guidance – especially as fall rolled over to winter.
It’s encouraging to see others noticing and questioning nature.I recently heard from David and Alison Grantham from Halifax. They came across an oak tree heavily laden with acorns and a Hawthorne tree displaying a bumper crop of berries. The Granthams wanted to know what Grandma would say about this?
Well, this might not make me or Grandma very popular, but Grandma believed that if any tree was bearing an abundance of fruit in late fall, winter would be severe.
Grandma, like so many others, would seek out the mountain ash in the fall for a look ahead to the coming winter. She believed that a heavy crop of berries pointed to lots of snow and high winds: “The more berries on a mountain ash three, the more severe winter will be.”
While I’ve not been able to find a correlation between an abundance of berries and a harsh winter, the weather folklore surrounding this fruitful tree is undeniable and Grandma would remind me not to question hundreds of years of careful observation.
Putting folklore aside, the production of nuts and berries is more an indicator of the past weather than future weather, but bumper crops – known as mast cycles of trees – are not completely understood and may have a tie weather. Time to start a journal…