Just saw an interesting article on CNN.com. What may be obvious to most gardeners has been proven. Plants with shorter life cycles, like annuals, adapt more quickly to climatic changes.
Does this mean to keep up with global warming and El Nino years and droughts and other weather extremes that seem more prevalent, we’ll end up growing just annuals, so we have something to grow?
I know a gardener who was fairly proud of the fact that she didn’t plant any annuals. Too much bother and wasted money, she said. Then I ran into her a few years later, and she said that she was expecting her annuals to be delivered to her house in a few days, and they would be all white flowers, as that was her color theme that year. (Hmmm, color theme? I’ll have to think about that concept…)
Yes, she had purchased so many annuals that the nursery or wherever she bought them agreed to also deliver them. What a change in attitude! I guess she is just one step ahead of the “non-annual planting gardeners” when it comes to dealing with changing climates.
I love annuals! So rewarding!
Oh no! I hope perennials evolve as quickly because I have a bunch of them. Luckily most plants have quite a broad range of temperatures they can thrive in and hopefully global warming won’t descend upon us so quickly but I’m not so sure…mostly I have a bad feeling that we’ve already passed the tipping point in climate change and things will get rapidly hotter than even the most dire prediction. The quickly melting glaciers worry me.
Thanks for the interesting article.
I loved my annuals this year and can’t imagine a garden without some. According to the “new” zone map I should be able to grow more perennials, I’m now zone 5 or 6!
I started out planting annuals (wildflower seeds) because I wanted to take some time to figure out what my yard as like before putting in large, expensive perennials. After a discouraging couple of years battling heat and drought, I’ve given up my plan to grow roses and other flowering shrubs and gone back to growing annuals from seed. I didn’t realize I was being cutting-edge.