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August/September 1998


Predicting Rain with Mother Nature


In the summer of 1998, we have renewed our obsession with rain in the South. After a rainy late-spring season, drought set upon us in June and July, browning lawns and destroying crops. As we wait for rain, it's a good time to remember that Mother Nature can help us predict its arrival. This column by the late garden writer Elizabeth Lawrence appeared in the Charlotte Observer on August 4, 1963. It appears in the book Through the Garden Gate, edited by Bill Neal.

Copyright (c) 1990, Bill Neal. Reproduction or distribution is prohibited without the express permission of the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.



Rain Signs
by Elizabeth Lawrence


St. Swithin's day if thou doest rain
For forty days it will remain:
St. Swithin's day if thou be fair
For forty days 'twill rain na mair

Saint Swithin was the ninth-century bishop of Winchester who later became the patron saint of Winchester Cathedral. It has been suggested that the ancient superstition, attached to him in the twelfth century or earlier, is the survival of a still more ancient pagan augury, and that it became connected with his feast day, July 15th, when a great downpour occurred on that day, in 971, while his body was being transferred from a forgotten grave to the cathedral. In France the weather on the feast of Saint Medard (June 8th) is said to determine whether the next weeks will be wet or dry. In Flanders the day is July 6th, the feast of Saint Godelive, and in Germany it is the Seven Sleepers' Day, June 27th.

The superstition goes even further afield. In a Chinese gardening book of the seventeenth century, the writer says if the sky is clear on the twentieth day of the fourth moon, commonly called the little day of the dragon (the rain god), it means that the dragon is tired and dry weather will follow. If it rains, the god is full of energy, and it will rain twenty days longer. Because he is an amphibian, many primitive people consider the frog the lord of the waters, and believe that he brings the rains:

Send soon, O frog, the jewel of water!
And ripen the wheat and millet in the field.

I asked Elizabeth Russell, who often passes on the folklore she learned as a child in South Carolina, whether frogs foretell the rain, and she said of course they do: whenever you hear the tree toads at night there will be showers before morning. The same, she says, is true of the bull-bay, by which she does not mean the night-hawk, but a regular bat who hollers like a bull. Once after a long rainy spell, when the weatherman said it was going to clear, Elizabeth said it wasn't. "Don't you hear that old chipmunk up in the tree?" she asked. "Long as he hollers it's going to rain."

And of course everyone knows about the raincrow. "Never," Virgil says in the Georgics, "has rain brought ill to men unwarned. Either, as it gathers, in the sky cranes flee before it in the valley's depths; or the heifer looks up to heaven, and with open nostrils sniffs the breeze, or the twittering swallow flits around the pools, and in the mud the frogs croak their old-time plaint."

Flowers, too, are weather prophets. The anemone curls its petals before a storm; if the marigold opens before seven, thunder will be heard; when chickweed flowers stay closed there will be rain; when they open wide there will be none for four hours; and if they stay open it will be fair all day. But of all the flowers the scarlet pimpernel is the most dependable. It is called the shepherd's weather glass, and, whatever the barometer may indicate, if it has its flowers "expanded fully in the morning, there will, to a certainty, be no rain of any consequence on that day." "Come tell me," the poet says,

Who gave the magical power
Of shutting the cup on the rain?

But I forgot the bees. If rain threatens, Virgil says, they do not "stray far from their stalls, or trust the sky when eastern gales are near; but round about, beneath the shelter of their city walls, draw water, and essay short flights." That a bee is never caught in a storm is proverbial: "When cautious bees forbear to roam . . . tokens are that rain is nigh."

Aratus, the Greek poet, whose writing on weather signs Virgil imitated, said no sign should be neglected. It is good, he said, to compare one with another: "If two agree have hope, but be assured still more by a third."

But the skeptics are always with us. All weather talk is foolish, the Scots say: "When it rains in the hill, the sun shines in the valley."


Through the Garden Gate is available at bookstores for $16.95 (paperback) and $27.50 (hardcover), or from the University of North Carolina Press, 1-800-848-6224. Say you saw it on the internet. Email ordering also available.


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