If April weather is often trouble, what should we expect in May?

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

We made it! Or did we?

Spring is surely the most anticipated season in four-season Canada. But as we enter May, can we expect our weather to finally behave?

In 2025, Townshippers have lived through a frigid January then a February white-out, followed by a cold March and a turbulent April.

Having learned nothing over the years, I decided to change to our summer tires on April 7.  The following day, we had a big snowfall. Driving cautiously through the snow front to Montreal, it dipped to minus-8 C. Later, I trudged along city sidewalks in the dark to a big hockey game, feeling like it was winter all over again. Brrrr.

We had more light snow in mid-April, followed by a slush storm to wake us up on the last Sunday of the month. Yup, for readers outside the Townships, we had winter weather much of the day on April 27th.

–Enough, already! The weather affects my mood and dictates our recreation and travel. Since I wrote about winter and summer seasons in Townships Weekend back in 2023 and 2024, now let’s try to figure out spring.

April fools us

The roller-coaster ride in April was not entirely unforeseen. Nobody here is ever sure about that month, and it often baffles commentators.

For years, one AM radio morning host in Montreal orchestrated an “April is winter” call-in rant to back his claim there were “six months of winter” in Quebec. Uh, not really. As a mid-April birthday kid, I recall many outdoor parties, garden events and baseball games then.

Newcomers to Canada, most recently a European acquaintance in Montreal, say Canadians “talk a lot about the weather”. But we have so much of it! Others quip that, while England has too much history, Canada has too much geography. You might add: lots of weather.

England has fine writing and most intense gardening culture, so it’s no surprise they have crystallized many apt sayings and aphorisms about the seasons. We just need to adapt these to Canada.

The end of winter unrolls slowly: “March — in like a lion, out like a lamb”. This is true enough in England but needs a tweak here. In southeastern Quebec, March regularly storms in like a lion, then slinks out like a tiger.

Then there is the hopeful “April showers bring May flowers”. Again, this is often true here, if you also count snow as a shower. The bloom may finally come only in June.

Anglophile poet T.S. Eliot’s lines from “The Wasteland” capture the ambiguity of spring thaw:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Yes, springtime can be a groaning, steady process. It does not happen all at once.

One old Townships country house we lived in featured a hand-scrawled pencil record inside a cupboard of “the dates the ice went out” on nearby Lake Massawippi. This record started in 1961, when ice was reportedly last visible on May 3-4. That was a late thaw; these dates more often clustered around April 20-22nd.

This year, the ice went out a bit earlier on Lake Massawippi, unofficially on April 14th. At least, no ice was visible from the North Hatley shore across to Baltimore Bay. Winter had ended, sort of, and we looked hopefully toward May.

May takes its time

The month of May in the Townships can be lovely and mild, or dour and overcast. The “darling buds of May” that Shakespeare cherished can always fall victim to a morning frost.

Environment Canada and private weather apps forecast that, in the first half of May, daily highs in Sherbrooke will cluster between 14 C and 18 C, and the outlook will often be cloudy and rainy.

The weather25.com site helpfully advises foreign travelers that “temperatures in Canada in May are quite cold … between 9 C and 16 C; warm clothes are a must”.

“You can expect about three to eight days of rain in Canada during the month of May. It’s a good idea to bring along your umbrella so that you don’t get caught in poor weather.”

That’s the May norm for our region.

German meteorologist Wladmir Köppen classified climate regions across the world with a five-letter scale, denoted from A to E. The five groups are A (tropical), B (arid), C (temperate), D (continental) and E (polar).

Each group is also identified by extra letters to denote its seasonal precipitation and temperature.

Much of eastern Canada falls into group D; southern Quebec is classified as Köppen Dfb: “Warm-summer humid continental climate; coldest month averaging below 0 C (32 F) …. , all months with average temperatures below 22 C (71.6 F), and at least four months averaging above 10 C (50 F)”.

Sherbrooke, like Montreal — and Moscow — is a Köppen Dfb locale. It experiences “long, cold, and snowy winters, warm summers, and short but crisp springs and autumns”. Short but crisp, maybe that’s the spring descriptive we’re looking for.

So we’re not alone with our loudly four-season calendar. I have lived through grey winters with little drama or variety (including in northern Europe and highlands Mexico). Their seasonal spectacle is dull compared to Canada.

So gardeners, beware those comfortable English aphorisms when it comes to planting. To be safe, as one Townships grandmother cautioned, never plant “until after the first full moon in June”. Even May is not safely spring, it seems.

Despite all that, we love our springtime. English poet William Wordsworth, in his “Written In March”, sums up the season’s promise:

There’s joy in the mountains;

There’s life in the fountains;

Small clouds are sailing,

Blue sky is prevailing;

The rain is over and gone!