Oak and Ash

By Daniel Butler, author and forager

It will not have escaped many of the sharper-eyed that ash is budding particularly early this year. Although this varies widely and is also localised, on my Welsh mountain the abnormally dry, warm, spring weather has led to ash leaves appearing some six weeks early – with many pipping oak to the post (budding varies from tree to tree).

Young ash leaves unfurling on 26 April

(Photo: Author’s own)

If English folklore is to be believed, this means we are in for a particularly wet summer.

If ash be out ‘fore the oak

Summer will be a soak

If oak be out ‘fore the ash

Summer will be but a splash

There are similar chants on the Continent, but these turn our most widely-cited rhyme on its head. Ash before oak in Germany leads to ‘bleaching’ and in Denmark it results in ‘pale’  (both refer to the washed-out colours created by long hot weather), while in Norway it will ‘sizzle’. Even within the British Isles there seems to be disagreement, with a Scots version agreeing with neighbours across the North Sea:

Oaks are just about keeping pace with their faster-growing broadleaf neighbours (26 April)

(Photo: Author’s own)

 If the oak comes out before the ash

'Twill be a year of mix and splash.

If the ash comes out before the oak

'Twill be a year of fire and smoke [i.e. drought]

This is, of course, just one of many examples of natural indicators supposedly acting as long-range weather predictors. The position of frogspawn within a pond is one – if it is bunched in the middle a dry summer awaits, while spawn around the edges means plenty of rain. Another suggests ladybirds clustering to hibernate presages a cold winter, while a Scots saying suggests plentiful hedgerow fruit foretells harsh conditions:

Many haws, Many snaws,

Many sloes, Many cold toes.                                                         

A good sloe crop has no bearing on the coming winter

(Photo: Author’s own)

It is tempting to believe that years of observation lend weight to this folklore, that by being close to nature our ancestors had an instinctive insight that is missing today. Science doesn’t back this up, however. The National Phenology Project is a long-running study of historic date and its records show no correlation between the average dates for ash- and oak budding and rainfall and temperature over the subsequent summer. Nor is there any evidence that wildlife is able to make long-term weather forecasts (although they can often respond to approaching rain, probably because they pick up minute changes in barometric pressures.

But although ash and oak budding may have no bearing on this summer’s rainfall one way or the other, it is still of interest. For example oak responds more readily to warm temperatures in spring, with every degree rise in average temperature, leading to it coming into leaf eight days earlier. In contrast ash responds speeds up with only four.

As a result, looking at centuries of amateur budding records can provide a surprisingly accurate insight into local climate change.