A Need for Re-evaluation
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Whether we like it or not, the climate is changing. Summers are getting dryer, storms more intense, and our winters are more erratic and generally milder. In this age of uncertainty, we must not cling to the old ideas about what works and what doesn’t in the garden. We have an opportunity to experiment with increasingly diverse selection of plants.
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While the aim of this essay isn’t to diminish the necessity to combat anthropomorphic climate change- we stand at the brink of cataclysmic loss of biodiversity, my goal is to simply point out ways in which we can adapt to the unfortunate reality of our time.
There is even a more pressing need to reevaluate our gardening tenets, for if we don’t actively grow and propagate plants outside their native ranges, in many cases those species will be lost to climate change. We’ve already seen great declines in many species, and this trend is only exacerbated by the increasingly fragmented landscape… plants simply can’t migrate to more hospitable habitats.
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While many of the changes reflected in the new USDA hardiness zone maps are not attributed to climate change, this is at least an acknowledgement that average temperatures are generally increasing throughout the country.
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