Every year from the age of 20 my mother, Jean Combes, who has died aged 96, recorded the time of year that four tree species – oak, ash, horse chestnut and lime – came into leaf. What started in 1947 as a personal project, driven by a simple love of nature, turned out to demonstrate with textbook clarity that the long-term trend in Britain has been for spring to start much earlier than it used to. Her 76-year dataset has been used by scientists in climate change modelling, and earned her national recognition in 2008 with appointment as an OBE for services to phenology, the study of periodic events in biological life cycles.
Jean’s data first came to the attention of scientists in 1995, when she read about the work of the Coventry University climate expert Tim Sparks, and contacted him about what she had been doing. Tim later described her records as “probably unique in phenological recording and, as far as we know, the longest recording by a single person anywhere in the world”.
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