raising the specter of plant death and gardener anger
Posted on 05/09/2007 9:32:40 AM PDT by Incorrigible
By MICHAEL MILSTEIN
— Tuesday May 08, 2007
[Portland, OR] -- New Zealand flax, a decorative plant with swordlike leaves, used to have a hard time surviving Oregon's winters. But the past dozen years have been so mild, the plants now flourish, lending an exotic touch to more and more Oregon backyards.
Global warming, as it nudges temperatures up and eases winters, increasingly appears to be helping gardeners grow plants once frozen out of their region. The trend is altering the rainbow-colored plant hardiness map that splits the nation into zones based on how cold they get.
That map is the official word for anyone who works in the yard, studies seed packets or leafs through plant catalogs, and wants to know where plants will likely survive.
But redrawing it has been as tough and contentious as redrawing state lines.
The question is: How much warming should the map show? Or, put another way, how blunt should the map be with gardeners about how fast their world is changing?
In gardening, that's a controversial question.
Some new climate maps suggest the world is changing fairly quickly. The Canadian government devised a new map showing warmer conditions across the continent. Sunset magazine's popular garden book also leans toward somewhat warmer conditions, its editors say.
But in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's official hardiness map (www.usna.usda.gov/Hardzone/ushzmap.html), the one often published in plant catalogs, the warming is ignored. That's because it has not been updated for nearly 20 years, making it far out of date.
Some say it's bureaucratic sluggishness. Others wonder about political pressure to downplay global warming. Government officials deny any skulduggery and instead offer many reasons including that one of its mapmakers was called to the Iraq war.
Suspicions were heightened a few years ago, however, after the Agriculture Department paid around $50,000 for an outside consultant to update the federal map only to scrap it in 2003 without showing it to the public. Then the scrapped version leaked out through the American Horticultural Society.
It turned out the scrapped map, based on temperatures from 1986 to 2002, showed widespread warming, affecting many new plants and raising the specter of plant death and gardener anger if the map were wrong.
Nursery industry leaders fought release of the map and claim some credit for killing it. They argued it might lull gardeners into sowing tender plants that would be ruined if a cold winter strikes.
"The nursery industry was very upset by that map,'' said Tony Avent of Plant Delights Nursery, a prominent mail order nursery in North Carolina. He said he told federal officials, "You're going to have everybody planting stuff that's going to die.''
Avent says it's only a matter of time before hard winters return.
Gardeners like to try new plants, especially those with an exotic and tropical look, said Robert Dolibois, executive vice president of the American Nursery & Landscape Association. But the businesses that sell those plants don't want gardeners to get turned off if the plants die.
"People will say, 'What did I do wrong?' which is the worst-case scenario, and they won't want to buy another plant,'' Dolibois said. "Or they say, `These guys didn't know what they were doing when they sold that to me.'''
But Kim Kaplan, a spokeswoman for the Agriculture Department, denies that nursery pressure had anything to do with the earlier map's demise. She says the government killed it because it was not compatible with modern computer mapping software.
"It would not have met the needs of all the users,'' she said.
Now the USDA has contracted with the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University to redraw the map.
A sophisticated climate mapping system developed at OSU is widely known as the best in the country. It will create a more finely detailed map, letting gardeners zero in on their local climate with much greater accuracy.
But the map OSU will draw is unlikely to show as much warming as the earlier map the government funded and then killed. That's because the Agriculture Department instructed OSU to base the map on temperatures from 1971 to 2000, a period about twice as long as the latest government map considered.
The effect of using the longer period is that it reaches back to include cool years, offsetting more recent warming. Leaving out the past six years also minimizes signs of warming.
It is likely to yield a new map similar to the outdated one seen today.
That pleases Avent, who sat on a federal advisory committee that discussed how the new map would be drawn up. The group decided that using the 30-year period would provide a more conservative view of climate change, which the nursery industry preferred, said Dolibois, who was also on the panel.
Avent said the less warming it shows, the better.
"Even though it doesn't tell you to grow all the things you probably can grow, it doesn't tell you to grow things you can't,'' he said.
He acknowledges the climate has warmed, but is skeptical that that will continue in the long term. A sudden cold winter would ruin prized plants.
"As a person who loves plants, I don't want to see people fail,'' he said. "We've got lots of customers who love to push the limits, but they know they're pushing the limits. People need to know when they're experimenting.''
Plenty of factors besides cold make or break plants, nursery owners note, but cold hardiness may be the best-known common denominator. It's been drilled into gardeners' thinking by decades of plant and seed catalogs with the rainbow-like map of hardiness zones.
"It's the most used climate map in the country,'' said Chris Daly, the OSU professor who developed the mapping system that will redo the map.
He said feeding 30 years of temperatures into the new map will produce more reliable zone boundaries, dampening effects of unusually warm or cold years. No matter how many years of data go into the map, and with or without global warming, there's always a chance of the climate surprising gardeners with unusual temperatures.
"It's kind of, `How lucky are they feeling?''' Daly said.
(Michael Milstein is a staff writer for The Oregonian of Portland, Ore. He can be contacted at michaelmilstein(at)news.oregonian.com.)
Not for commercial use. For educational and discussion purposes only.
Is there a FReeper Gardner ping list?
Without the Honey Bee’s that are dying from Genetically Engineered plants we are all going to die anyway.
I don't believe so, but there is a GW list, I believe it is xcamel who keeps it.
They better change mine to a colder zone.
The Frost free zones are now more South than they used to be. Acres of dead and abandoned citrus groves dot the countyside from south Georgia to Mid-Florida. Global warming my hind leg!...........
We used to grow citrus in Zone 8b, so where is the Global warming? We should be growing BANANAS & PINEAPPLES by now!.......
So the big global warming catastrophe here is that the hardiness zone map has not been redrawn, so some people are not aware that they can grow tropical plants further north than they are led to believe by the current USDA map?? This is the BIG problem caused by global warming?? Man, these folks are totally ridiculous.
Stratford, TX, 1936: Dust storm
The Left banks on a vast ignorance of history and science on the part of the public to force them to accept blatant Stalinism (with them in control, of course). Weather patterns are cyclic in nature, but conservatives have until now been too cowardly to take-on the Left.
I imagine that someone in Startford, TX, today might say that growing conditions have improgved in the past 70 years.
Every time I believe the hype and try a plant that needs conditions one zone warmer than where I am, we have a hideously cold spell and the things are ruined. This has been going on for 25 years and it happened again this winter. So I’m not wild about the idea that conditions really are getting warm enough that gardeners can discard the old map.
Tony Avent is right and is a brave man for speaking out in an industry riddled with moonbats. He also runs a fabulous mail order nursery. Plant Delights catalog is chocked full of Tony’s irreverent humor and is a pleasure just to read. (not to mention all the very rare and cool plants.)
http://www.plantdelights.com/
If the redrawing of the gardening map is a pressing concern to some people, it's clear we live in a very near worry free world.
I'd like to congratulate our human race on the near mastery of all concerns. I'm going to celebrate by planting palm trees in my New Jersey backyard.
GE plants aren’t killing honeybees. Mites are.
This is a stupid idea. Even if global warming were really happening the way they say, there’s still the potential for unusually cold spells that would kill anything too cold sensitive. I’d continue using the old maps in my locale.
Said the nappy headed ho mo.
That idiot map includes me in with Albuquerque. Not only am I 2500 feet higher in elevation, the mountains to the west of me change the precipitation patterns quite a bit. So plant companies always ship on an Albuquerque schedule, and I have to keep stuff limping along for atleast an extra month to six weeks in a greenhouse.
I don't even take the tire chains out of the truck until Memorial Day, much less plant tomatoes.
Last I heard, they’d picked up a virus. If you’re given that cite, could you ping me to it please?
How did things like NZ flax survive this past winter’s big freeze? Heck even down here in Cali, we got hammered. Killed off parts of my lawn.
On top of that, the map cannot show microzones. I know a lot of microzone gardeners who will carry on about that map. They live in urban areas with a lot of concrete and buildings that provide warmth and protection from the elements - they can grow one zone warmer usually. I’m always somewhat gratified when a late hard freeze teaches them a lesson (a little gardener smugness on display here).
I think the map can be improved for accuracy as pointed out by some posters here, I don’t believe that bumping almost everyone up a zone (as I heard discussed when the “new” map was leaked) is going to serve the gardening public in the long run.
Yeah for Plant Delights and someone with sanity.
I’m still pruning away damage and pinching off dead stuff from the late freeze this spring - global warming indeed!
They better change mine to a colder zone.
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Mine too, we have had red and white oaks, crepe myrtle, pecan, hickory and other trees stripped of leaves by late frost. I don’t recall eve seeing this happen to this extent here. The nice thing is that the more I hear about global warming the cooler the summers are here even though you may hear noise to the contrary from mainstream media. Last year every time the temp. went over ninety there was wailing and gnashing of teeth but nobody comments much on all the days of BELOW normal temperatures.
We should start a Gardener’s Ping List, Gabz. Bet lots of Freepers would like to chat about their garden adventures. It would probably be slow now with all of us outside more often than not, but it would certainly pick up later in the season. Lots of areas to discuss under “Gardening.”
We’ve had just a wonderful Spring here; however, we’re really low on rain and it’s really been too warm for the Pansies and other pretty “Spring stuff” to do all that well.
But things will all even out; they always do. I always plant one Zone colder than I am (I’m in 4/5, so I always err to the 4 on tender plants) and have excellent success.
Since I’m more concerned with food production, fruit trees, berries and cutting flowers I really have little desire to grow a Passion Vine, or anything “Tropical” up here. If you have a nice three-season porch, that’s one thing. If you’re serious about food production, it’s a whole ‘nother ball game. ;)
I don't think it's political--I think it's economic-- a zone 6 plant which gets frosted out one night by a zone four cold snap may mean a good chunk of money down the drain. The average lows are based on like a twenty year moving average, but that doesn't rule out a return to previous lows.
If you’re willing to help out - I’ll be willing to maintain a Gardener’s ping list.
I agree it will be a bit low key right now, but I bet we could generate some interest, and maybe even have a weekly type thread either in the “chat” or “bloggers” section of FR.
We’ve had horrendous winds since Saturday night and I have done NOTHING outside since that afternoon when I put in 90 row feet of lima beans and hubby staked out 210 feet of black plastic “sections” for me (7 strips at 30 feet each).
I need to get another 90 feet of limas in, as well as 4 different types of green beans. Jax and her friend Becky started a bunch of seeds for me last week, and all of them are now ready to go in and I have close to 100 tomato plants and about 75 pepper plants that need to go in.............and I haven’t started my corn yet!!!! Tomorrow.....tomorrow.......tomorrow..........
I dont know anything about bees. I just know what I read.
I read some “expert “ claimed it was Genetically changed plants that were kiling them. You say mites.
Your guess is probably as good as theirs.
And yet I look out my SW Ohio window (zone 6) and see the dead knockout roses, the struggling forsythia, the dead lady in red hydrangeas, dinnerplate dahlias, and nonexistant verbena, gone from the ravages of 2 weeks of late spring single digit temps.
Al those above plants have wintered over the past 14 years with no problem. Of course now it is warm ... its supposed to be .... gee global warming??? What a bunch of maroon’s
You bet I’ll help!
I’ve been working 60+ hour weeks. I’m actually letting part of my garden lie fallow this season; something I haven’t done in 12 years! I know neither of us will be able to keep up with it this year.
Luckily, I now work with a lot of “Farm Market” types, so I can place some orders for fresh, local food. :)
Looks like it’ll be a good year for fruit, too! Apples, peaches, pears, plums are all blooming...and NO late frost in sight for once in a decade. Yippee!
Fall will be ‘Jam City,’ LOL!
The raspberries and strawberries I planted last year did not work..........so I will have to rely on the local U-pick orchard for jam fruits.
Right now I’m waiting for the fog to lift.....so I can finally get these girls to school. This is the 2nd day in a row fog has caused a 2 hour delay for school.
We had a ‘fake’ spring this year, and all those early blossoms got frozen. A new zone map will not be instructive to the actual plants that they are going to loose everything they put forth out of season.
Honestly, I don’t think anyone really knows. Some other scientists have suggested cell phone signals.
However, cell phone signals aren’t technically any different (from a biological effects standpoint) from TV and radio signals and they haven’t hurt them.
And 5 minutes from my front door here in so. California I can find groves of avocado and orange trees that were killed or severely damaged in last winter's rare frosts. Yet I heard airhead Laurie David on TV this morning raving on about the terrors of globaloney warming. She either lives in Beverly Hills, about 40 miles east of me, or over the hills in Malibu, may 25 miles away. She's apparently not aware of the 'warming' we're experiencing right in her own neighborhood.
There have been honeybee die-outs before, prior to Genetically engineered plants, and there likely will be again.
At first I wondered if it were just my bushes, but then I noticed my neighbor's rhodies doing the same thing.
And it happened massively in the Midwest this year.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-05/ps-bms051705.php
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