Garden roundup - Flowering & diversity

TPP finally got caught up on his first day of flowering data & got his database up to date except for a few unresolved issues involving a faulty memory. Firstly, for certain plant species only groups of varieties are recorded and kept track of, e.g., hostas.  Our gardens being shady have lots of varieties b but when it comes to flowering there are early varieties, mid-season varieties (most of them), fragrant ones (a different species), late small-leafed varieties, and really late flowering varieties (like Red October).  But there are dozens of varieties altogether, but only those flowering entries.  Species are all treated individually, if known.
In total, for the 2017 season, which started for us on the 12th of February (the recently mentioned witch-hazel).  And which ended on the 4th of October (wolfbane or Monk's hood), our gardens had 337 flowering events, actually more but only herbaceous and woody perennials are counted, no annuals unless they are native & take care of themselves, to get the total diversity the 'did not flower' species and the 'new' (dnf) plants also have to be counted, bringing the total of  363 flowering plants, plus another 28 gymnosperms and 19 ferns for a total diversity of a bit over 400 species.  It keeps us busy, but wandering our gardens to see what's new is a favorite activity for the cocktail hour. Native species weigh in at around 121 species and growing as our woodland garden expands, but it won't when the leaf guys take away all the chopped leaves.  Hey, you owe us a couple of tons of leaves!
Finding new plants that will grow here is becoming more difficult.

Spring sprung, sprang!

According to my data, the Phactors ususally have 5-6 plants that flower in March.  So far this year 35 plants have flowered in March, and there's still quite a few days left!  Unfortunately, the metabolisms of many early spring flowers are just not adapted for temperatures in the high 70s and low 80s, so at these temperatures, things do not last long.  Bloodroot popped up, flowered, and was done in 3 days.  Three days!  It's like watching regular spring flowering in super fast speed.  Wow!  Today was spent removing rabbit barrier fences and pruning some trees and shrubs.  Two dwarf apples, Nova spys (terrific new dwarf version of a great, superb, apple variety), and one is growing wonderfully, lots of spur shoots and flowering, the other is reaching for the sky, no spurs, no flowering.  The pruning will be severe.  After pounding on a dwarf pear for the last couple of years, it's beginning to shape up, and is going to flower for the first time.  Mrs. Phactor will be most pleased as the pear tree was for her.  But if the heat isn't turned down soon, the flowering timeline will really get things our of whack.  Fortunately, pollinators have been active too, and carpenter bees were busy at the bush cherry. 

Spring has sprung, almost - in February?

Here in the upper midwest February has been a winter month for as long as the Phactor can, uh, uh, oh, something, period.  And both my faithful PC and my fancy satellite-signal updating watch say today is the 17th of February, and the high today will be 50F.  The earliest any plant has ever flowered in the Phactors' gardens, not counting the silly chickweed which is already in flower, is March 1st.  On the route to work a favorite hedgerow, long neglected, is filled with snowdrops and aconite, and they are in full bloom, an event always ahead of the Phactors' shady gardens.  The tens of thousands of scilla that will turn our yard blue are poking up everywhere along with all the other early bulbs.  Still witchhazel usually wins the trophy for earliest in bloom.  It's going to take quite a bit of mental resetting, maybe by satellite signal, to start thinking of February as spring.  A terrifying thought just occurred; field research will start earlier than ever and overlap even more of the semester!  How to ruin a decent morning's late winter revery.  Pass the seed catalogues and a margarita, please, and we'll see if we can adjust. 

Never Enough Time or Money

The Phactor routinely gets asked to identify plant specimens, and in doing so our herbarium collection is used for comparison and to verify identifications. But a colleague dragged in a specimen that demonstrated a gaping deficiency in our collection of plant specimens. For certain local habitats, particularly dry hilltops and ridges, as well as priaries, no new collections have been made in over 100 years! What a shock to pull out a folder and only find one representative specimen, and that now mislabeled because of some major taxonomic research that has realigned a group of genera and their species! It was hardly any help at all. In an era when climate change may well be affecting the biology of organisms, altering their flowering period and even geographic ranges, the magnitude of this deficiency is apparent. And even the Phactor is to blame having collected way more tropical plants than those from the local flora. The solution is to get busy collecting, and then you run into the dredded T & M problem, time and money. Collecting isn't rocket science, so perhaps volunteers could be inlisted, up to the point where a species name has to be afixed. What a terrible situation, but nothing a couple more botanists couldn't fix.

Now is the time ....

It's spring here in Lincolnland and this is the time for action.
First, now is the time to begin a flowering log for your garden to keep track of what and when everything flowers. Such a log will show you when and where you have flowering "gaps" and the beginning of data that can be useful for showing changes in the flowering season. Such data kept for over a century (and this is why you should start as soon as possible) have shown significantly earlier flowering in the northeastern USA, a trend consistent with a warming climate. The Phactor has never done this himself formally, and it will be a challenge what with several hundred flowering plant species to keep track of (150+ trees and shrubs & who knows how many perennials).
Second, now is the time to begin ignoring your lawn. This can never begin too early. Avoid the temptation to buy all that high nitrogen lawn fertilizer all the stores have in stock. If you must spread something to keep the neighbors from staring, spread milky spore to provide a biological control of Japanese beetle and other lawn grubs. At most sow some seed on bare spots. If you start your lawn out early on a fertilizer diet it will expect water and nutrients all summer long, and rather than having your lawn go dormant in the heat of summer, as it should, you will be out there mowing, harvesting all that inedible biomass, a wretched excess caused by your own exuberance and misplaced energy. Think of the money you will save and buy yourself some new plants so the garden shops don't go under. Remember, a monoculture of grass just is not very interesting, not sophisticated aesthetically, and not ecologically stable.