Six degrees of separation

Saturday

I woke this morning with a heavy heart. I’m pretty sure that tonight is going to be the end of a budding azalea season. The temperatures are predicted to plummet to the low twenties. Numbers like that are not, in themselves, cause for alarm, but for the past several weeks, we’ve had abundant sunshine, ample rain and temperatures routinely reaching the mid-seventies.

The result? A gorgeous mid – March landscape with everything budded up and many things, including pansies, spring bulbs and some azaleas already beginning to bloom. I envisioned a long and glorious spring gardening season – until The National Weather Service sent out their dire prediction for the weekend.

I hope they’re wrong, even by a few degrees, because the difference between freezing – and a few degrees above – will be the difference between things thriving in the garden – or not.

I wasn’t too worried about the pansies, which I know to be quite frost tolerant.

Monday

Unfortunately, a lot of things seem to have fallen into the “or not” category. Our thermometer registered 26 degrees on Sunday morning – six degrees below freezing and cold enough to do some significant damage to early blooms and the tender young growth of perennials and shrubs.

Ummm, brown isn’t my favorite color in the garden. Even though the lower blossoms still look pink they, too, were frozen and will soon drop.

I’m not too concerned about the long term health of my plants, most of the permanent plants have good strong root systems and I’m confident this will only be a temporary set back. The frozen blooms and buds of the early blooming azaleas will simply shrivel and fall off. The tender new growth of many hydrangeas may have been killed back, resulting in reduced blooming this year. Interestingly enough, the new growth on the native Oak-leaf hydrangea seems unaffected.

Though new growth on most of my hydrangeas froze, the new leaves of this native oak-leaf seem just fine.

Diminished bloom from my beautiful shrubs is the price I pay for partnering with Nature. For me, it’s only aesthetics. For farmers and orchard owners, the price, literally, will be much steeper. Peaches are a 240 million dollar crop in Georgia and if freezing temperatures reached these orchards, the impact will be huge.

The spring bulbs such as grape hyacinth (above) and Scilla (below) seemed unfazed by the low temperatures.

I want to place the blame on something and climate change seems a likely candidate but really, our temperatures have not been unusually high this winter, and mid-March is definitely within the time frame that we could expect frost. It was just unfortunate timing – the sudden cold sending shock waves through the garden. But it’s all part of gardening and I just have to accept the fact that when I garden, I am not in control.

All I can do is provide a happy place for my plants, tend to them like a mother hen and to make every breath one of gratitude for the gift of my garden, no matter what the temperature is.

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