Give your garden a global-warming makeover

Home gardeners can do a lot to address global climate change. Options include everything from choosing self-reliant plants that need less water and fertilizer to reducing energy use by trading in mowers and blowers for rakes and hand clippers.

CLIMATE-PROOFING used to mean tossing a little mulch on the garden, hauling pots of tender plants indoors, and maybe even digging up the dahlias when a cold winter is forecast. But global warming has caused weather to grow so volatile that these traditional practices just don’t cut it anymore. Our gardens need year-’round help to deal with the new weather realities, including increasingly rainy springs and droughty summers. If you doubt the significant effects of climate change on our gardens, think about all the plants you consider hardy that probably wouldn’t have weathered winter even just a few years ago. The list varies by microclimate, but might include escallonia, abutilon, verbenas, Melianthus major, phormium and yuccas. Have you noticed birds returning earlier in the spring and lilacs blooming two weeks ahead of when they flowered 30 years ago?


We need a fresh arsenal of garden strategies, and it will help if we better understand the changing weather where we live and garden. University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass has written an engaging new book, “The Weather of the Pacific Northwest” (University of Washington Press, $29.95), to help us do just that.

Mass explains how our climate is influenced by mountain ranges and moderated by the Pacific Ocean. He reminds us that a scant eight of our annual 38.4 inches of rain falls during the summer months. While there is great year-to-year variability in our weather, Mass documents a warming trend, increased precipitation, a decrease in snowpack in the mountains and less snow in the lowlands. This seems to translate into fewer hard freezes and flood-inducing downpours alternating with drought.

Seattle Times