‘What can I say about the weather down here in [month] that is repeatable in polite company?’ About which month did I write this? Answer: May. About which other months in 2013 could I have written it? Answer: January, February, March, April and June. Last month continued the pattern of dire weather since the beginning of the year.
Everyone has been long-faced and the weather has been the major topic of conversation. The only bright spot has been that the garden has burgeoned because of the rainfall but everything is very late this year. A French friend invited us to pick cherries from his trees. He reckoned they would be ripe later this week.
‘That seems a bit late,’ I remarked.
‘It’s a whole month late this year,’ he replied.
However, the gardens during Rendezvous aux Jardins weekend looked lovely this year. Here are some photos from the garden of Terri Tippett, an Englishwoman living near Parisot who is a garden designer.
‘How did you get your garden to grow like this?’ I asked enviously.
‘I imported 20 truckloads of soil.’
Not something I shall be doing anytime soon.
Now, on to the weather. Every month I post an update on how the weather has been in our corner of southwest France, based on the statistics we have kept since 1998. To see the other weather posts, please click on ‘Weather’ under the Topics tab in the right-hand sidebar.
Weather assessment for June
A quick reminder of our subjective weather assessment: we assign each day a plus if it’s fine, a minus if it’s bad and a zero if it’s indifferent or we can’t decide. In June, there were:
Pluses – 12
Zeros – 8
Minuses – 10
The graph shows the percentage of plus days each June for the past 16 years (the line is the trend). This makes June 2013 the worst we have had over that period, in common with January and May. The other months this year were not quite in the same category but were still amongst the worst.
In 2013 to date we have had only 48 pluses. Over the same period in 2012 we had 80, 2011 (101), 2010 (68), 2009 (89).
Rainfall
Our rainfall stats go back to August 2004. In June, we had 58.5 mm compared to an average of 58.8 mm. It rained on 10 days as opposed to nine. This puts June on the average. However, it was generally gloomy, cold and damp. You couldn’t organise an outside event without having a Plan B (like our fête at Teysseroles and some friends’ 50th wedding anniversary).
This week, things have been looking up and the forecast is for fine weather for the foreseeable future. Everyone down here feels we deserve it.
Copyright © 2013 Life on La Lune, all rights reserved
Life on La Lune 
The good news is the summer finally seems to be here, even in the Alps. Seems we always go from one extreme to another – suddenly they’re talking about ‘plan canicule’ in parts of France!
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It does seem to veer from one to the other with nothing in between. 10 days ago we were still having fires in the evening; today it’s already around 30C. A couple of months ago, Météo France said July would be hot and it appears they were right. However, it is forbidden to complain about the hot weather!
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Terri’s garden looks beautiful:) To cheer you up (maybe it won’t), but the weather has been atrocious everwhere, even in Provence.. Here in Tuscany (still haven’t sold the house) we’ve had low temperatures, torrential rain, and even snow on the local mountain at the start of June. Sunny now, but still a bit unstable which is very unusual at this time of year, but at least it has warmed up and we still have zillions of fireflies in the garden ….. these usually disappear at the beginning of June. I’m intrigued to know whether you have fireflies too?
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I know it’s been pretty awful everywhere. Sorry you haven’t yet sold your house. And your weather sounds like a carbon copy of ours over the past few months. Now, the anticyclone has arrived and it’s due to stay (so they say) till at least 14th July.
We do get fireflies (or glow worms if we’re talking about the same thing). We did see some in June but they were rare this year. It’s possible that we’ll still see them but they become rarer as the summer progresses.
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