Plant life
The first time I noticed it here was 3 years ago. I’d planted okra along the back, by the ornamental grasses. It grew to almost 6 feet, its leaves like umbrellas. “Too much nitrogen,” I thought. But I hadn’t given it any extra nitrogen, and the soil wasn’t all that rich, either. One of the reasons I grew okra — besides the pods, which we loved in soups and fried, and besides the pretty flowers (okra was part of the hibiscus family, after all) — I knew okra was pretty much suited to any old soil. Not picky. Originally from Africa, it liked hot weather.
Except where we lived now wasn’t so hot. In fact, it was cooler, so far. A cool persistent wind blew, almost all days now.
Now this year it was the hostas and the anemones that towered above their plant neighbors. Weedy, rangy, huge. I continued to suspect that what had happened to the okra was happening to these species, too: They got too much green growth.
Never saw anything about it in any of the news publications I read.
When I finally googled it, I discovered, sure enough, that research was showing that “in response to elevated CO2 levels, above-ground plant growth increased an average of 21 percent.” I’d found 2 reputable sites reporting this fact — Columbia University’s Climate School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “ask MIT climate.” But the research had been done nearly 20 years ago.
This year I put in a lot of what were considered “native species.” People were doing this now. I planted milkweed (Asclepias) coneflower (Echinacea), black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia). All of them were slow to grow. Not sickly, just …very slow. Here we were at the summer equinox and only a few of each of them were blooming. It was as if they were growing in slow motion. S — l — o — o — o —w-ly the buds formed, and sat. Didn’t bloom.
My reliable stand of bee balm (Monarda), though it had continued to spread over the years, had this spring been viciously attacked by insects and fungi. I’d dosed it many times with neem oil. It was the first time I’d ever had this reliable plant suffer from pests. Now it had seemingly survived that attack, but it too was waiting. Buds at the ready. No blooms.
Originally called “global warming,” deniers at first, but then some scientists too, came around to calling what was happening “climate change,” maybe convinced by the argument that people could better relate to “change” than “warming” — because everything wasn’t warming, but everything was changing. The cause was heating up of the atmosphere. The result was that everything was changing.
I kept seeing it, wherever I lived. But people didn’t talk about it anywhere I was, either. It seemed to have become what “sex” was decades and decades ago: something you didn’t talk about in public. Although this might have been because of the culture wars. It was hard to tell.
I tried googling “reduced flower production climate change” — asking for research within the last year — but the top stories the search returned were all about how the problem was affecting the floral industry and the bridal industry. Yes, flowers were not blooming as regularly or predictably; but the story was about how florist shops were suffering because of it. If it affected commerce, I guess, we were concerned. Otherwise, maybe, not so much.
I did find one article that mentioned “citizen science” volunteers interested in the same stuff I was interested in here reporting their findings — but there was nothing conclusive, other than “yes, flowering times are changing for some plants.” This of course disrupted the pollinators’ schedules — and one of the big reasons I had put in all these flowering plants was for pollinators. (And I had not seen a single bee this year.) There are many pollinators other than bees, of course. Many tiny flying insects visited my gone-to-seed lettuce and arugula and parsley. But no bees that I ever saw.
Google results tell me there are 54 million accounts on medium.com. So the chances of anyone ever seeing any of this I’ve written are beyond doubtful. However, it’s a record for me. And maybe that’s all I can expect now. “Peppers leaf leaf leaf and it’s two weeks from August. A few buds. Should be peppers by now,” I wrote over 3 years ago. (That’s in my book.)
So I should have known.
