Autumn turns to winter - so soon?

[Maggi Young]

No sooner had the October 2012 International Rock Gardener  gone online as a celebration of the Autumn colours in the Northern Hemisphere, balanced by some of the Spring joys in the Southern hemisphere, than winter has arrived in the form of snow to many places in Northern Europe and to places in North America, too.

This photo from Susann Nilsson, of the Abisko National Park in Sweden,shows the almost bare Betula pubescens  with a snowy background - beautiful, but cold!

[John Aipassa]

If we can skip the torrential autumn rain storms and the dull windy wet days of the fall and go straight to the 'dry' freezing sunny weather with or without snow storms, than I am all for that  .

Sunny and cold weather here too, but no snow yet.

[Hoy]

Skip the rain? Oh no, that won't ever happen
After a short interlude of two days without rain (instead one had hail and sleet and one sun), we are back to normal rain tomorrow

Beautiful Abisko anyway

[ronm]

Back to GMT tonight for us,  . Fall back.

[Philippe]

Hi

We are having here the first snowfall with damn cold NE winds. -6°C and about 10cm snow 
Well, october can sometimes clearly belong to winter by us. When I just think we still had almost summer for 7 days, with 20°C + 

[Gerry]

Snow in NE England overnight. Gone by 10.00 a.m. in 'sunny' Durham 

[Magnar]

This is what we woke up to yesterday morning.. Winter came during one day, and is still here.

[Paul T]

I must come and visit this topic in future days as the weather warms up.  It should keep me nicely chilled. 

[mark smyth]

Magnar what are the two upright trees?

[Magnar]

Magnar what are the two upright trees?

Populus tremula erecta

[David Nicholson]

First frost of the Autumn here this morning when I got up, all gone now though.

[David Nicholson]

It having done nothing but rain for most parts of the past three days I took advantage of a 20 minute pause and reversion to drizzle around 1500 this afternoon to walk down to the village and look at our river, the River Erme to get some pics. It is said that the Erme is the fastest rising and falling river in the country and I have to say that at 1000 this morning as I passed it in the car it seemed to have been flowing faster than it was at 1500. It;'s a pretty short river rising on Dartmoor above the village and exiting to the sea at Mothecombe no more than 15/20 miles from source to exit.

More information here:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Erme

http://www.flete.co.uk/flete-estate/mothercombe-gardens/