A friend is having her garden watered and reseeded today. The proper look of summer, plenty fields of gold.

---

We keep missing out on most of the rain here, grass is browning quite nicely....

---

European report, as the dampness starts to green the verges back in Blighty.

On a flight from London to Geneva today:

Southern England obscured by cloud but I know most of London is now back at BGI 2 after a few days of patchy rain. Northern France appears to be 2 too.

Central-Eastern France from Paris down to Bresse - wow! It's like flying over the Spanish Meseta. Looks like a clear 4 on the index. Geneva and along the North shore of the lake are a strong 2/3, very unusual for what is usually a very wet and thundery region. Even the high Jura plateaux are browning. Never seen that before.

Freezing level on the way down was around 4,300m and this before the heat really builds later in the week, so the glaciers will be suffering given the lack of Spring snowfall and early start to the melt season. Very different from Scotland this year.

I'm visiting southern Burgundy in a week's time so if the thunderstorms hold off (which they may not - Saturday looks wet) I'll get some first hand viewing of the French Meseta.

---

Meanwhile, my grass here in Greater Manchester is as lush as ever and needs cutting every week! It's been a good few years (or couple of decades!) since I've seen yellow lawns here. Probably 1996 to be honest.

Became more greener in Langley area but back home in Epsom remain more parched as it missed all the storms last Thursday night.  No weeds had grown in the garden thanks to the dry weather and after a little rain on Sunday I quickly raked the soil on the edges where it a bit more wet from the run off from the pavement to stop the weeds growing, they will grow like mad like it did last year washout August if I do not maintain it during the weekends.

Very golden brown around surrey as much as I've seen in a long time. Worth a few photos. 🙂

---

5 of the last 8 days have seen rain here - but it has only ever been very light, in fact mostly drizzle, which is unusual for this time of year as July raindrops are typically large even when the rain rates aren't high.

It reflects an unusual amount of stratiform cloud as opposed to convective.

 

Anyway, the consequence is a lot of increasingly brown front lawns and off-road tracks bedded with dust nearly an inch deep in places.

I reckon this dryness helped temperatures to rise above expectations today; it got close to 24*C despite the synoptic setup being very benign, which is around 2*C above what most forecasting models and agencies were calling for.

Of course the pendulum does also swing the other way - it could become particularly chilly at times this week if breeze eases off under clear skies at any point.

As it is, a steady breeze looks to keep tonight into or close to double figures despite a lot of clear skies, and it may be a similar story tomorrow night, though maybe a touch cooler.

With little rain around and well broken cloud expected at times, the strong sun shining through clean air imported from within the polar regions coupled with the breezy conditions is a recipe for further drying out of the surface, even accounting for a few scattered showers.

 

Friday, though, could bring a significant break for much of England and perhaps Wales. Details are highly uncertain so we can only watch and wonder.

---

We got everything in place for a very high temps under very dry conditions but sadly we had been denied access to it by the models that refused to let the heat move north so it a huge wasted month already, and soon the temperatures in France would drop naturally as August wear on.

We need rain here in Kent.  All my water butts are empty.  Friday holds much potential, as does Sunday-Tuesday.

---

Ditto Sussex. BBC weather saying that the SE has had 55% of normal rainfall Jun-Jul (I think), Scotland has had 120%

---

This summer has to date seen approx 35mm of rain down here, with no significant rainfall for about 5 weeks.
The usual grassy places have taken on their normal summer look of straw colour, however there are a few places (fully exposed to the day sun) with a fair amount of green still.

I put this down to natural selection - this grass being more drought resistant. Long periods of dry weather are not uncommon down here during the summer, and even when the rain falls it's often heavy but short lived.

 Yes there is a lot of difference in drought tolerance amongst native grasses . Perennial ryegrass , very popular , but very shallow rooting and soon gives up . Cocksfoot, meadow fescue and timothy are are far more deep rooting as is red clover and will keep on growing . 

Plenty of lush green grass greeted my return from holiday. With a good deal over 100mm of rain so far this month the only question is will it be dry enough to cut?

---

Very golden brown grass land and hay with the hard fields for summer sport.

---

I've concluded this summer is about as extreme an example of NW/SE divide as we will ever see.

A few days after driving North from France past leaf-shedding trees and wild fires (Burgundy) through stage 3 parched grass (Up to Reims) to partial vegetation recovery (London) but still a typical summer regine, I took the train on the East Coast Line up to York.

The East Coast line travels through an area squarely on the dry side of that Tees-Exe line we all learned about. Yet what I saw was shocking.

From somewhere in Hertfordshire Northwards, barely out of the London suburbs, the grass is a peculiar almost psychedelic colour. Luminous green. Almost like being in Ireland. Yet in London and down to Kent and Sussex the dominant colours are yellow and that summery olive green that half-parched grassland gets.

It's not the Tees-Exe line, it's the Lee-Test line. The far South East has been brushed by the shenanigans further South whilst the rest of the country has lived through a summer of misery. It's 2009 on acid. I'd forgotten that colour of green existed.

If this is the shape of the future then I'm looking for a retirement home in Thanet.

---

A 'summer of misery' seems extreme - it hasn't been that bad at all here. Only the final week of July ruined an otherwise average summer, and that resulted in the vivid green landscape that was absent before.

The grass up here just doesn't turn brown regardless of how dry it is. It goes yellow in patches, but even in 2003 and 2006 green was the predominant colour albeit with significant yellowing. Our soil probably retains more moisture. We were drier than London last month.

Besides, yellow grass isn't very nice. The weather here has been warm and dry for the past week, but no sign of our green grass going a foul shade of yellow. Tourists don't dream of England's yellow and pleasant land, do they?

---

Went to cut the grass today and yet again the long lush green grass was too wet to cut.

---

The brown grass is here and there now. The exposed areas are green again with the brown grass elsewhere.

---

We could really do with some rain to revive the grass, not to mention other parts of the garden. But the MetO forecasts which offered rain on Tuesday now seem to be uncertain of it even on Wednesday - my rule of thumb is that if forecast rain gets put off for 24, then 48 hours, it'll never arrive!

---

You might get some rain tomorrow morning . End of the week good chance of thunderstorms and "thundery" rain pushing up from France across the south although i expect it will be hit and miss . I took it that the rain forecast for Tuesday is now coming Monday as i thought Monday would be dry. I dont think i have ever known 1-2 day forecasts so lacking in confidence as this summer.

Next rain would be on Friday so another 4 more dry days to come and it starting to go back to lovely parching landscape here.

Driving along the M20 towards Ashford in Kent you'd be forgiven for thinking you were in parts of Southern France, long stretches of previously grassy banks were dry and dusty looking.

---

That's just as a result of the pollution from all the lorries in Operation Stack. 

---

 

Today we have driven from home to Burgundy (Beaune). It was cool and raining in Calais and for about the following 50 miles, but then suddenly the sun came out and the temperature shot up, and we found summer!  I haven't followed the different grass definitions in this thread, but where we stopped for lunch near Reims, the grass was "completely dead" stage. Black. An ex-parrot. Etc. 

---