Thanks to our mild winter, this past spring season was the most glorious in many years in our area. The early profusion of daffodils and tulips was followed by a gorgeous display of flowering crabapple trees, magnolias, and dogwoods, as well as our azaleas and rhododendrons, which bloomed fully and profusely.
This also was the best season we can remember for our hydrangeas, which benefited from the lack of winter cold-snaps that can prove lethal for the vulnerable tips of the plant that are the blossom. (We use an anti-desiccant spray on ours in order to provide some protection from winter’s chill, but even that does not shield them when temperatures plunge into the single digits, which we avoided this past winter.)
However, the best part of our gardening efforts have come with the bounteous harvest of our tomatoes and other vegetables over the past six weeks. We planted our seedlings the weekend before Memorial Day, with the cherry tomatoes ripening in the first week of July. These days we only have a small patio in front of our condo, so we plant all of our veggies in large containers (which have the added benefit of keeping them out of the reach of the rabbits), but we have had more tomatoes, both cherries and the big ones, as well as cucumbers and summer squash, than we ever have had in our decades of growing vegetables.
So yes, climate change, which is bringing us warmer ocean and air temperatures and milder winters, is not a good thing. But we have to admit that our delicious tomatoes, which taste just so much better when they come fresh from the garden than anything you can buy in a store and which benefit from our record-setting hot and humid summers, bring us a simple yet profound joy each and every day.