The English have long been not merely accomplished gardeners, but astute, careful observers of gardens as well, and of nature in general. Gilbert White kept such a meticulous garden journal for some years that, generations later, we can track with great precision when broad beans were planted in any given year, or when strawberries were ready to be picked.I’ve often regretted that I have never had the foresight to record details of planting and budding and leafing out in the careful way that White, or his American successors Thoreau and Jefferson, thought to do. I have only my faulty memory on which to rely as I compare seasonal events from year to year.
As a result, I cannot be absolutely certain that trends I think I detect in my own tiny bit of ground are really there, and that I’m not imagining those trends. Even so, unless my memory is totally awry, I am convinced that I am seeing the effects of climate shift in my own garden, over my lifetime of more than a half-century.
In fact, I am certain that some of those shifts have occurred rather decisively in the past decade or so, and that they portend major shifts in our climate and the ecology dependent on the climate. This year, as in the last several years, jonquils began to spring up before the middle of January—something I am absolutely sure I never recall happening in my childhood. And, just as has been happening for several years now, the japonica began to bud before 15 January, and now has a few open blossoms on it.
These are flowers of early spring, not of winter, in our mid-South climate. In my childhood, they did usually appear before winter was quite over—often in the second half of February. Since central Arkansas used to have its fiercest snowstorms most often in that part of winter, too—when it used to snow at all, that is—people in this area often joked that we lived in the land of frozen daffodils. Just as the jonquils had bloomed, a big snow often fell: you could predict when we'd have snow when you spotted the jonquils.
Winter is—I’m sure of it—not what it used to be, here. The spells of balmy weather that encourage leaf and bud are more frequent and more protracted, interspersed with bitter cold snaps that nip anything that has begun to grow. Though some folks seem to think that the unusual cold of those cold periods disproves global warming, to my way of thinking, the extremes in temperature go hand in hand with the trend to warming. The climate is unsettled, and the swings from pole to pole are evidence of the unsettlement, not of any anti-warming trend. The tornadoes we've now had for some years not only in spring and fall, when the weather changes abruptly, but in winter itself, are evidence of the unsettlement.
Summers have been hotter and hotter here of late, it goes without saying, though it’s less easy for me to spot all the evidence for that in my piece of ground so clearly as I can see it in winter, when each leafing out is a dramatic event that provides striking evidence of nature's movement away from cold and dark. I do know with absolute assurance that plants I could not ever grow in this climate in seasons past—plants my grandmother longed to have in her garden, but which defeated her if she tried to grow them—now overwinter and thrive here.
These are plants we used to call semi-tropical, plants that grow in the gardens of the far Deep South—plants we went to New Orleans or Mobile to admire. About seven years ago, for instance, I put a small sweet-olive shrub into a sheltered bay on the south side of the house, hoping I could coax it along for at least a year or so, and have its heavenly aroma fragrance the air for a season or two.
The shrub has now grown to the size of a tree, taller than the lowest point of the roof on that side of the house, lording it over the fig tree downhill from it. Sweet olives in Little Rock? Unheard of, until recent years, especially when they grow so rank and prove so hale.
I’m having similar experiences with butterfly ginger and lantana, both of which were always grown here as annuals in the past. Now, they die back for winter and then spring forth again with warm weather, as good as new each year.
I remember driving through Georgia a year or so ago, when it was hot as blazes. The whole state was parched and brown in early summer. It was that summer that the lakes of the state began to dry up to such an extent that the water supply of Atlanta was threatened.
On that trip, I remember reading an op-ed piece in the Atlanta paper by some idiotic journalist who encouraged her fellow Georgians to welcome the warming trend, even if it was due to global warming. She spoke of all the wonderful new plants people could grow in north Georgia in recent years, of how she could sit on her deck late into the night even on spring days, enjoying a glass of iced tea. All compliments of a George W. Bush she deeply admired and had worked to put into office . . . .
I wondered whether, as the water supply of Atlanta dried up that year, she continued to hail global warming. I wondered if she was still enjoying that iced tea overlooking the lake with no water in it. I’m still wondering, as I watch my japonica begin blooming before February is even here, and as the maple in the front yard puts forth buds, and the jonquils send their green shoots through soil that should be at rest in the middle of winter.
