A crazy gardening year

Mark recently ran into a gardening friend of mine who asked him if I thought it had been a crazy gardening year. "Oh, Linda thinks every year is a crazy gardening year," was his reply. When he told me this I got rather annoyed until I realized he might be right. It seems like every gardener I know in person — or in the blogging world — is fixated on weather and climate more and more. How can we not be when the weather we were used to and designed our gardens for is fluctuating in ways we've rarely experienced in the past. 

This year we lost a lot of trees, shrubs and perennials that were anywhere from a year to 15 years old from a cold winter with no snow until too late to help. Then the cold lingered and we had our biggest snowstorm of the season on April 18th!

Then there was the rain. The official count is a good 10 inches of precipitation above  normal for the year — and they measure it at a location that did not get the 10+ inches that our side of town received in August. So who knows how much my garden actually got? And now we are having days where the high temperatures is anywhere from 10 to 20 degrees below normal. 

In 2017 I was complaining about above average rainfall and rain events until it suddenly stopped at the end of the summer and we had a dry and extremely hot autumn. 2016 was a year to remember for all the right reasons. Mark and I both tried to enjoy beautiful days with just the right amount of heat, sun and rain — knowing it might be a long time before we would again experience such a year. Just how long is anyone's guess.

Comments

[Peter/Outlaw]

"Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." We gardeners are a bit fixated on the weather. Here, I'm wondering if the predicted frost will actually hit the ground or just stay higher. Did I remember to get all the tender plants inside?

[Loree / danger garden]

Your intro set-up could have played out between Andrew and a friend of mine. I guess I'm guilty.

[Nell]

It's remarkable how quickly the memories of good seasons, or "normal" ones, get buried by the anxieties of bad ones. Now even more so as an ageing brain makes memory less reliable, while climate change produces extreme events more often. I'm finding my garden journals helpful in holding onto those increasingly rare peak seasons.

An example I can still call up unaided, though, is 2017's miraculous eight weeks of peonies. The norm here is for steam heat and thunderstorms to ruin the latest-blooming varieties, which formed an unfortunately large percentage of the plantings I inherited. Over the decades, I added mostly early kinds to lengthen the show, which made it a lot easier to handle the usual early-June debacle. But in '17 the spring rains came at just the right times, and the air somehow stayed dry after Memorial Day, producing an extended spectacle that may not happen again for a long time. The knee-weakening voluptuousness of the very late lactiflora doubles had an effect all the more powerful for its rarity, and I finally forgave my father for his planting choices.

This year the peonies were wiped out even earlier than usual by heavy rains, but it didn't bother me at all because I'd reveled so fully in last year's long, lavish show.

[Kris P]

Maybe 2019 will be an improvement for all of us! I've been complaining about the weather here since we moved in almost 8 years ago. At first, the winter cold seemed intense after 2 decades enjoying the moderate temperatures in a beach city. Then came the summer heat, a good 10 degrees higher on average than our former location. Since then, we've had a deepening drought (with the exception of the winter of 2016-17) and seemingly ever-increasing temperatures. We can only hope Mother Nature will throw us another bone - soon.

[Lisa at Greenbow]

Oh yes, these gardening days are no longer predictable. We are having below average temps now but at least we have had rain. The weather is crazy. I keep telling myself not to complain, there is nothing we can do to change things. Just roll with the punches.

[Frank]

I think a hazy memory is a wonderful thing for gardeners to possess. It's so much less discouraging to think of all the hail and downpours, drought and flood as rare quirks we deal with than jus the normal ups and downs!
I was about to complain about the sudden drop from autumn to winter and then realized nearly the same thing happened last year. Like Peter says there's not much you can do anyway!

[Erin @ The Impatient Gardener]

No doubt about it: This WAS a crazy gardening year. And yes, I suppose unpredictable weather will become second nature to us in the future. Gardeners are not nearly as adaptable as the plants they work with.