The Rowan is full of berries....

...which will be turning red soon.

This abundance is, I always have thought, one of the harbingers of a hard winter.

I suppose I learnt that from someone, but I knew as I was  looking it up this evening that I was  doomed to disappointment.

Thus this  from Wikipedia:  


 "In Newfoundland, popular folklore maintains that a heavy crop of fruit means a hard or difficult winter. Similarly, in Finland and Sweden, the number of fruit on the trees was used as a predictor of the snow cover during winter, but here the belief was that the rowan "will not bear a heavy load of fruit and a heavy load of snow in the same year", that is, a heavy fruit crop predicted a winter with little snow.
However, as fruit production for a given summer is related to weather conditions the previous summer, with warm, dry summers increasing the amount of stored sugars available for subsequent flower and fruit production, it has no predictive relationship to the weather of the next winter.


In Malax, Finland the reverse was thought. If the rowan flowers were plentiful then the rye harvest would also be plentiful.Similarly, if the rowan flowered twice in a year there would be many potatoes and many weddings that autumn.And in Sipoo people are noted as having said that winter had begun when the waxwings(Bombycilla garrulus) had eaten the last of the rowan fruit.


In Sweden, it was also thought that if the rowan trees grew pale and lost color, the fall and winter would bring much illness."