May 2026 followed on from a lengthy, sunny, dry spell at the end of April, and with a couple of warm days, many more plants quickly sprang into leaf and flower around the garden.
Even if the sunny days had left us, we had a little much-needed rain. It developed into a benign and quite cool start to the month, with many dry days, but often very chilly nights and cool Northerly winds. The garden has looked stunning.
A consequence was that many of the Clematis montana and Rhododendron lasted in flower for much longer than normal – typically strong sunshine and high temperatures curtail their flowering.
This YouTube captures what the dawn chorus can be like at this time of the year:
One of our biggest issues has been massive acorn germination after last year’s enormous crop. It’s been a huge effort trying to hoik them out, and we fear multiple follow-on waves of seedlings in the weeks, or even years, ahead.
The lower hay meadow has been a mass of pink-flowered, hemi-parasitic Lousewort this year in early May, and the first orchids began to flower, albeit on short stems, around May 10th.
We had mixed weather for our May opening weekend on 16th/17th, but plenty of lovely visitors.
With the added drama of a swarm leaving one of our colonies mid-morning on the Sunday and settling out as they often do from this ‘hive’ onto a trunk of one of the spiral apple trees. Since we have no need for a new colony, we called our beekeeper friemd Sandy, who arrived asap with her husband Alan, and together they made a valiant attempt to capture most of the bees through the rest of the day, returning at dusk to take the bees away.
I could also point out a pristine Grey Dagger moth, which I’d spotted on the wall of the cottage, and as is their want, stayed motionless throughout the day.
We’d talked about putting some text onto the concrete slab, which has stayed propped up against the cowshed wall for years, becoming gradually framed by a self-sown plant.
After a couple of tweaks, we have something we’re both happy with.
3 days later we welcomed another group – this time of keen Belgian gardeners who have planned their own self-drive holidays for decades. A great time was had by all, and they managed to avoid the showers.
Our punk blakbird even put in an appearance.
Then off for a much-needed week’s R&R in Pembrokeshire, which coincided both with a very hot spell of weather, and a massive thunderstorm which moved up across West Wales. Only 9mm of rain seemed to fall but this was sufficient to avoid issues with plants in pots, in our absence.
We returned just in time for another group visit, another honey bee swarm cluster on that Sunday, and a riot of wasps/bumbles and honey bees on the Nectaroscordum sicculum flowers, the meadows awash with orchids (over 2,000/250 in the upper and lower hay meadows) and a massive influx of thousands of immigrant Silver Y moths, and Painted Lady butterflies – we’ve never seen anything like it.
The weather records for May in recent years are listed below with maximum and minimum readings highlighted. The monthly rain total for May 2026 of 91.8mm, with 11 dry days and 460.92 KWH, places the month into average territory. (The PV inverter reading was a little lower than actual, owing to a short power outage towards the end of the month, due to the thunderstorm.)
Coming after a cool April, and a cool first half of May. I was therefore surprised by the skewed report from the Met Office, which labels spring 2026 as the warmest on record – mainly because of the very high temperatures during the last week of very hot weather in May. Perhaps the mean temperature was higher, but many previous days were surprisingly cool. It was also interesting that, as far as I could see, the Met Office didn’t produce its customary monthly report for April 2026 – which I was expecting to confirm that it was much cooler than other recent Aprils. Thus, the headline-grabbing “Warmest Spring Ever” is out of kilter with what we noticed, our plants experienced, and is recorded in these Garden Views pages: our spring flowering plants lasted in flower for much longer than usual, because of the lack of hot days until right at the end of spring. Our honey bees were also much slower than usual to start drone flights.
2013: 110 mm, 17 dry days, no frosts, PV N/A
2014: 140 mm, 10 dry days, no frosts PV 406 KWH
2015: 142 mm, 10 dry days, no frosts PV 441 KWH
2016: 114 mm, 17 dry days, no frosts PV 492 KWH
2017: 112 mm, 16 dry days, no frosts PV 478 KWH
2018: 58 mm, 19 dry days no frosts PV 512 KWH
2019: 51 mm, 20 dry days no frosts PV 501 KWH
2020: 23 mm, 25 dry days, no frosts PV 609 KWH
2021: 291mm, 6 dry days, no frosts, PV 440 KWH
2022: 71 mm, 10 dry days, no frosts PV 436 KWH
2023: 28 mm, 24 dry days, no frosts PV 577 KWH
2024: 81 mm, 16 dry days, no frosts PV 400 KWH
2025: 46.85mm, 22 dry days, no frosts 572 KWH
2026: 91.8mm, 11 dry days, no frosts/1 borderline air, 460.92 KWH