What’s a Weather Tree?

The Weather Tree is a poster (85 x 64cm) depicting a tree with twelve branches to represent the twelve months of the year and with a leaf for every day of the year.

Colours are chosen to represent different weather types and a leaf is coloured in each day with the appropriate colour(s). At the end of the year you will have a unique, lasting and individual record of the weather in your locality.

Who’s it for?

The Weather Tree makes a popular present for all ages from pre-school children to the elderly. It is easily coloured in using felt tip pens, crayons or water colours.

Customise your Weather Tree

Further “leaves” can be added to the key to give a more detailed breakdown of weather types.

Details such as frost, wind, thunder etc. can be recorded by outlining the leaf in a particular colour and maximum and minimum temperatures can be written next to each leaf.’

History of the Weather Tree – the idea for the Weather Tree

The idea for the Weather Tree came from an account of Chinese family life written by an American woman staying with a Chinese family in 1920. (Waln, Nora. The House of Exile).

The Chinese chart

She recalls helping the lady of the house prepare paints for use in the “Chart of the Lessening of the Cold”. This was an annual record kept as an aid to garden and farm work.

Each year she painted a plum tree on a silk scroll, giving it nine branches and each branch nine twigs. The tree was decorated with leaf buds in brown, green and silver and the shadow of a pink blossom was painted on each of the eighty-one twigs. After the winter solstice one blossom was painted each day according to the weather.

Companion scrolls

A companion scroll recorded the harvest for the corresponding summer and autumn so that the effect of the winter weather on crops could be seen at a glance.

Scrolls recording the weather in this form had been kept continuously in this family for twenty-two generations and were stored in a pair of cabinets of black wood carved with garden and farm scenes.

Whether the keeping of such records was a widespread practice or peculiar to this one household is not known.