Prolonged British summers. Do they exist?

This weather doesn't seem out of the ordinary to me, nowhere near as prolonged as 1976, and there were some great summers in the noughties, also. It's just a surprise after the mediocre summers we've had the past few years with a particularly dire one last year.

I was just leaving university in 1976 so wasn't a gardener then. Good thing because I'd be really distressed if I had to watch my plants all wilting and dying for lack of rain. The grass everywhere was scorched brown for weeks and weeks, trees were dying, no Autumn colours because many leaves just shrivelled before October. I don't see how there could have been decent crops of anything that year unless you were able to water consistently.

2011 was a grey cool summer but I seem to recall a lot of my plants with limp leaves for some weeks - we'd had dry winters, hadn't we?

Oh yes, I was living with my grandma in the summer of 76, and she was obsessed with keeping her Kaffir lilies alive, so I had to take out the puddle of washing-up water every day and pour it on them with her standing over me pointing at the bits she wanted done! It was that bad.

Apart from the terrible Spring, I think this growing season has been good, so far. We've had rain when it was needed (a good drenching on Monday night/yesterday morning, for example) and lots of warmth, now.

My memories of summer in the 60s is that there was a terrible wind and rain storm every August bank holiday where they'd have to open the village hall and provide soup kitchens for all the campers.

 

The rain seems to be a little strange; from what I've seen on Facebook, Nottingham is under water! I've never known the city centre and some other areas to be flooded