It's still a long ways off ...

… but oh, my, it feels like spring out there this morning. We take the dogs out as soon as the sky begins to fill with light, and once again the early morning temps were above freezing. Most of the gardens have just a thin layer of snow, and one of them is nearly clear. The birds are singing, the air feels hopeful. This is January?

The new USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map is out, reflecting the climate changes we’ve all been experiencing. Here in the shire, we’ve been bumped up from 5b to 5a, a +5-degree difference. While this sounds like increased opportunity for growing daylilies that had only been considered marginally hardy before – and that may be true – it’s become obvious that climate change is more than just increased average temperatures. We’re now seeing the predicted increase in major “weather events” of increasing severity – droughts, torrential rainfalls and flooding, record-setting heat waves, extreme snowfalls, an alarming increase in the number of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms.

There’s a corresponding shift in the gardening world to xeriscaping, or selecting plants that have low needs for water and can withstand dry spells. Daylilies are pretty tough and resilient; those thick roots hold onto moisture, and the plant can take a good amount of less-than-ideal conditions. I have a friend who pulled a daylily from her garden some years ago, deciding she didn’t like it, and tossed it onto her compost heap. There it sat during a long New England winter (the kind we used to have!), and the next summer, it caught her eye – blooming atop the compost.

Nonetheless, daylilies are at their best with regular rain or irrigation. That’s when their blooms will be the most abundant. Here in New England, we have the occasional dry summer, but fortunately (so far) we more commonly have plenty of rain during the growing season. It may be time to start thinking about rain barrels and grey water, though, especially in communities where the use of outside faucets is sometimes curtailed. Those increasingly common reports of prolonged dry spells and dangerous heat waves in other parts of the country sound pretty alarming to this gardener, given that we really don’t know how climate change will continue to play out here.