Spring Frost, Spring Snow

We all know it's been an odd year.  Here in Ithaca we waited for Winter until Spring, when summer threatened in April.  Warm and even hot days drew some plants out of dormancy 4-6 weeks early, and then prolonged mild temps coaxed them even further along.  Some were the living picture of vulnerability, and making it truly tragic in the Greek sense of the word, they had no idea what fate awaited them. 

The word on the street is that the mild winter and spring felt weird, but downright enjoyable.  I kind of agree.  Most Central New Yorkers find the beginning and the end of our winter season the hardest--but many of us love the heart of winter, with snow and bracing cold.  It hardens us and makes the softening of true spring that much sweeter.  But this winter, once we got over the absence of snow, it was starting to feel sweet having late spring weather in early spring...


Then the first hard freeze came a few weeks ago and we saw some damage to those plants that had leafed out early.  Fruit trees, some grapes, some of the edible crops...and if you love Magnolias, it was like watching a baby bird die...sad and cruel, but a reminder of nature's indifference to the things we cherish.  The magnolias won't die--just their flowers went from pink and white to a dark leathery brown overnight--so the baby bird analogy doesn't hold up all the way.  But it's a graphic reminder of where we live and why certain plants don't persist here.  We can plant them all we want, and many will make it, but nature's enormous data set is cold-blooded and if we have a pattern like that even every 25 years, it will cull out any faint-hearted or ill-adapted plants.

Today a heavy wet snow snuck in on us overnight.  Forecasters, starved for any dynamic weather all winter, seemed to sandbag on this one--at 11:30 last night the call was for possible accumulations in the western Finger Lakes.  I trust weather forecasts and unlike many people, I choose to focus on how often they are right.  To me, the important thing is not whether it's 55 or 60 degrees but whether it's warming or cooling, whether a system is approaching, whether we will see unusually warm or cold trends ahead...so the surprise this morning was just another surprise in life.  I spent a few hours whacking at my mature lilacs and birches with a hockey stick, for lack of a better tool--freeing them from snow weight so they could start to stand up again.  White pines here seemed to take it the hardest--a fateful combination of snow-holding branches and relatively week wood.  We had a similar late wet snow about 5 years ago and I remember seeing Eastern red-cedars (Juniperus virginiana) along Route 13 near Cayuga Heights leaning all the way over under the weight.  To this day many are still crooked.  Remember, it's fine for them--their two main goals are binary: alive or dead?  reproducing or not? 

In a few weeks spring will come again, another pulse of energy from within the ground and from our celestial position.  And then it will rest on a more secure foundation: it will be hydrated.  Enjoy the snow.