Poems by Bonnie Overcott

Signs of Changing Climate in My Garden

by Bonnie Overcott

From Canary Fall 2018

Bonnie lives in the Minnehaha Creek watershed two blocks from the Mississippi River and eight blocks from Minnehaha Falls Park.

“I’m not a scientist,” reply some of our elected officials when asked about climate change. You don’t need to be a scientist. Ask any amateur gardener or bird watcher and they can document the rapid and accelerating changes they see in our climate.

Gardening since my 4-H days in the late 1950’s, I used to joke that I wanted an orange tree in my Minnesota back yard. If that wish ever became a reality, our earth’s climate would have gone through devastating changes. Nurseries advertise hardy orange trees that can be grown as far north as central Georgia. Orange trees suffer damage between 26° and 28° above zero F. Even in Minnesota’s southern zone of 4b, temperatures can hit 25° F below zero.

I’ve joined my neighbors who spend part of their summer picking off the Japanese beetles feeding on the gardens since their first appearance in the 1990s. They are not the destructive force in Japan, where they have natural predators, that they are in Minnesota. Once controlled by our cold climates, they thrive in our warmer climate. Each beetle eats over 300 plants in its lifetime. In my garden they can be found feasting on the leaves of the raspberry bushes, hibiscus blooms and the leaves and blooms of the rose bushes. They chew until the leaves are lacy and skeletal. Gardeners with blogs are documenting their slow movement northward as our springs become warmer.

There’s no known herbicide specifically for Japanese beetles that won’t harm bees and butterflies. The grubs live in the ground and eat the roots of the grass, causing dead spots. Traps sold end up attracting more beetles to your yard. The best method of ridding the beetles from your garden is to go out each morning and late afternoon with a jar of soapy water and shake them into the jar. I hate killing things, but these critters are so destructive, I’m perfectly capable of plucking them from my hibiscus blossoms or buds with my bare fingers and plopping them into soapy water.

In the last days of September, the autumnal equinox marks the end of summer. We slowly slide into the darkness of winter as our earth tilts away from the sun. In the past a hard frost killed the annuals, tomatoes, and cucumbers in mid- to late September. I was never one to bundle up my tomatoes in old sheets and towels to extend their growing season, preferring to let nature take its course. The raspberries quit bearing fruit. The basil succumbs to cold quickly, but the other herbs like parsley, thyme and sage stay viable and usable for a few more weeks. The house plants are snugly inside. The last September frost in my area was in 2000.

After the frost we often enjoyed an Indian summer, free of mosquitoes, with warm days and cool nights without the extreme heat and humidity of July and August. Around the neighborhood, red and gold leaves are shaken from the deciduous trees by fall breezes. As their leaves float down and swirl around on the sidewalks, people take their last pleasant walks of the year. The leaves are shredded and used as mulch in my gardens, where they will decompose, feeding the gardens with the nutrients in their leaves, adding organic matter to the soil and feeding the squiggling earthworms that in turn will aerate the soil by burrowing around and leaving nutrient-rich waste products in their trail.

It always seemed such a shame that the first frost devastated the perennials and annuals. After adding color, form and texture to the garden, the perennials turned yellow and brown as they gave up the ghost and died back to their roots. The annuals, which brought brilliant color to the garden, turned brown and black and limply draped over the edges of the window boxes, planters and pots, ready for the mulch pile, even though the days were still bright and sunny.

Now in October, as I sit and observe my gardens, the Joe Pye weed’s pendulous seed heads bow towards the ground. The goldfinches, fading from their neon yellow summer color to a drab brown winter coloring, merrily fly from one to the other eating the seeds. My cat likes to sit underneath the six-foot plants and look up at the birds feasting. The slimy gray slugs have taken their toll on the tenderest hostas, chewing the leaves in between the spines until they are lacy. It’s time for the garden to go to sleep, but without that first frost it stays awake, slowly continuing its life cycle.

The sky seems bluer. The air seems clearer. The lawn begins to recover from the summer heat and grows vigorously into a thick carpet of emerald green. I refuse to do any mowing past Thanksgiving out of principle. In Minnesota the ground should be frozen, if not covered with snow by then.

There are an abundance of squirrels and birds at the feeders. The babies are mature enough to forage for their own food. The half-grown baby squirrels pilfer leafy materials from my gardens to carry up the trees to build their own nests for winter. The dried hydrangea heads moving up the trees amuse me as I wonder if they are constructing or decorating. The chipmunks have accumulated enough bird seed to crawl into their winter homes and stay there until they sense the spring sunshine or their seed cache disappears. I’ll have to yank the handfuls of spindly sunflowers that sprout in my houseplants, planted there by those chipmunks. The monarchs that normally leave at the end of August are making a few more passes through the gardens.

Another guest visits my garden at night. Opossums, unknown to this region twenty-five years ago, scuttle into the yard. I hope they feast on the slugs that devastate the hosta rather than my raspberries and tomatoes. The warmer winters enabled them to expand their range from the Southeastern states throughout Minnesota. In our coldest winters, they may get frost bite on their ears or tips of their tails, but they survive.

Late October and there’s still no killer frost. One January, my neighbor divided and moved her perennials. January in Minnesota and the ground was still not frozen, let alone covered in a blanket of snow. Rather than a white Christmas, we often get rain. I worry that the spring blooming plants will get confused as I look at my garden and see the crocus sending up green leaves and the lilac and azalea buds getting plump.

Now we often go from the hot, humid days of July to the dog days of August into our Indian summer with mosquitoes. One year, I ate my last home-grown tomato in December and mentioned it in my Christmas letter. The annuals still bloom, but they’re leggy. They performed beautifully all summer. Without that first freeze they’re forced to go on living like an ancient person convinced God forgot about them.

“Indian Summer” was first used in 1778 by a New England farmer and became commonly used in England in the 19^thcentury, even though its origins came from the Native Americans of the new world, not the Indians of occupied India. Today in the United Kingdom the frequency of Indian summers is indicative of our warming earth.

The Indian summer that sometimes came after the first frost in Minnesota was a welcome gift. It motivated people to finish fall projects. It signaled that gardens needed to be put to bed by laying down mulch on tender perennials, wrapping tree trunks of young trees to prevent rabbits from nibbling them, and clean up gardens to prepare them for spring. Now it is another sign of our changing climate as it is just a late extended warm period at the end of summer. It seems heretical to tie Native Americans, who maintained a spiritual relationship with the earth, to a phenomenon caused by its plunder and abuse.

My USDA hardiness zone used to be a solid 4; the lower the number the colder the weather. Now there are parts of my state that are a zone 5 and zone 4 has moved further north. Large portions of Minnesota are one zone warmer today than they were in 1990. Many gardeners in my neighborhood are risking planting zone 5 trees and perennials. I’ve long envied the ability of my Texas cousins to enjoy crepe myrtles, typically a zone 7 plant. There are some varieties that are hardy to zone 6 and even zone 5. I’m tempted to go for it since I live in a microclimate of zone 5. It’s still a long way off for that orange tree, though.

Last year it stayed so warm until Christmas, I couldn’t make my ice lanterns. Families went bicycling on Christmas day.