A brightness, a golden lustre only hinted at in previous weeks, often comes to glorious fruition in the very early days of June.
Tall trees cast steep, black shadows in the noon-day sun. In the evenings, they can be seen to loom out dark and huge against the mellow skies of gold and pink.
The coolness that was still very evident in May becomes a rarity and the atmosphere can now turn close and sultry after only an hour or two of morning sunshine.
June takes its name from Juno, the very beautiful but jealous wife of Jupiter, chief god to the citizens of ancient Rome. Juno, flamboyant and imperious, drove around the heavens in a style to suit her rank, in a golden chariot drawn by a strutting pair of peacocks. However, the month which bears her name is of a gentler and more appealing disposition.
It is sunny for a start. There are, on average, six hours of sunshine on a typical June day over most of Ireland, with more than seven recorded in southern parts of Leinster. And, as you might expect with all this sunshine, average rainfall figures are comparatively low; indeed June in the driest month in many parts of Ireland. A "good" fall of rain - more than, say, 5mm - typically occurs on only three or four days of the month.
The average maximum afternoon temperature in June is about 19C. On six or seven days of the month, the temperature exceeds 20C. Very occasionally it creeps above 25C, and in fact the highest air temperature ever recorded in Ireland occurred in this month when the thermometer registered 33C in Kilkenny on June 26th, 1887.
In that year June turned out to be the sunniest month ever experienced in Co Dublin, with an average of nearly 10 hours of sunshine per day.
But the Irish climate is nothing if not inconsistent. Records for high rainfall have also been set in June, and many readers may recall the great fall of rain on June 11th, 1963, in Mount Merrion, Dublin. On that day 184mm of rain fell in prolonged thundershowers and 85mm fell in an hour around lunchtime.
Every June clearly has a character of its own. Nevertheless, as balmy breezes waft across sweet-scented meadows on a calm June evening, it is hard to disagree - on average, as it were - with the conclusion once implied by Walter Scott:
Who loves not more the night of June,
Than dull December's gloomy noon?