It is not in my nature to be the purveyor of doom and gloom. I am a dyed-in-the-wool optimist. Gardeners, we are told, differ from farmers in that they always think next year will be better; farmers know it will be worse. For both cultivators of the earth, there were lessons learned over the past 12 months—not all of them positive.

The most salutary was that cold snap in December of 2022. In Braemar, Aberdeenshire, for instance, on the 13th of that month, the temperature fell to -17.3˚C. The day before had certainly been cold, at -9.3˚C, but the overnight drop amounted to 8˚C. All right, so Braemar is not on a par with the southern counties of England, including my own locale of Hampshire, but even here -5/6˚C of frost saw off the likes of penstemons and shrubby salvias that we had persuaded ourselves into thinking were so much hardier nowadays than they were 50 years ago. Oh, it’s a dangerous assumption. Global warming and climate change are certainly raising the mean average temperatures across the country year on year, decade on decade, but climate is not weather and weather, as both the gardener and the farmer knows, can be at best capricious and at worst devastating.