Date the 200th plant flowered

Wow!  It was not quite a month ago that TPP posted his 100th-plant-flowered blog. Here in the northern temperate zone, May is a really busy month for flowering plants, and while May still has another 6 days to go, the 200th plant flowered on May 24th. This is the second earliest date when this many plants flowered in the 6 years of recorded data: 2010-June 2, 2011-May 30, 2012-May 10 (!), 2013-June 2, 2014-June 2.  June 2 has been quite popular as the date in 3 out of 6 years. To give you some idea of how spring-loaded our temperate zone flowering is our garden flowering has been topping our just shy of 300 plants. So 200 plants flower by late May or early June, then fewer than 100 flower the rest of the growing season that usually finishes with monk's hood flowering in late October. Without being able to check right now, this year's date may have been moved up a few days by additions to our woodland garden, but then you get losses too. Until all of this data gets put into a proper database (a work in progress), it's hard to know, but lots of plants are flowering a bit early here in late May like our sweet bay magnolia that usually waits until June. There's also the possibility that some trees got missed especially the wind pollinated ones. The basic dweller of the burbs with a few yews planted around the foundation of their house cannot imagine how 200 different plants is possible. One thing that is noticeable is that largish gardens have room for some of the "old-fashioned" flowering shrubs to grow to mature size where their natural form has not been ruined by "poodling": forsythia, spirea, spicebush, kerria, Carolina spicebush, beauty bush, mock orange. The problem is that these plants are sold as nice little rounded bushes and people pay no attention to the mature size information usually provided. The main intent here is that our gardens keep us watchful and give us an excuse to walk around each day with a cocktail to see what's new.

Interesting flowering data

Data from our garden flowering log shows some interesting patterns.  Here's one.  So far 2013 has been above average wet and below average in temperature, and in general flowering has lagged behind and seemed late, especially last month.  However, the 200th different plant to flower event occurred this year on June 2nd.  Looking back to 2010 and 2011, the same event occurred on June 1st and June 2nd.  Everything sort of averaged out to provide a sort of benchmark of flowering consistency, and this includes various DNFs (did not flower), a few new additions, and some cancellations (deaths).  No surprise deaths and new additions tend to balance our; when something dies you replace it either in kind or with some new magnolia.  Not much of a choice really.  However, you probably noticed that 2012 was not mentioned.  Last year the 200th flowering event occurred on May 10th!  That's three weeks earlier.  Amazing.  This means that just about two-thirds of our flowering events happen by Memorial Day.  That's a shady perennial garden for you.  So that garden tour scheduled for June 16th can expect shade and not much else.  TPP will make them a list of what they've missed.  So why schedule a garden tour for June?  Well, those petunia and impatiens gardeners have to get their little annuals planted.  What kind of garden is that?  You can bet those gardens don't even have a magnolia.