Gardening in a changing climate

Rose had been doodling

Abby Rose had been doodling her dream home for a year, so when she walked up to the listing for an affordable one-story apartment in Traverse City, Michigan, she knew it was home before she even looked inside. Native oaks and maples cast dappled shade on the front and back yards, but Rose, 34, could create the gardens she envisioned, leaving plenty of sunny expanses with fruit trees and wood-chip paths between neat beds of flowers and vegetables. "It was love at first sight," he recalls.

Community Garden to keep

Before buying her own little piece of heaven in the fall of 2016, Rose joined the Traverse City Community Garden to keep her hands on the earth. She grew up 200 miles northwest of the area as the crow flies, watching her mother tend more than 100 garden beds on the Keweena (KEE-wen-aw) Peninsula, a mile from Lake Superior at the tip of Michigan. Upper Peninsula. Exploring his native soil as an adult led to a connection with his mother, Vicky Wecklars, through their shared passion for gardening.

Wecklars has lost count of the number of times he's been driven to the Lower Peninsula to help tend his daughter's community garden and plant her new home garden. During those trips over the seasons, Wecklars has noticed something about the region. "They still get the winter," he says. "But now that area is getting more freezing rain instead of the snow I grew up with. It's like, 'Nice try, winter, but...'"

Rose lives seems

The Traverse City area where Rose lives seems to have experienced the most dramatic temperature increases in the Great Lakes region, or anywhere. In 2019, The Washington Post's climate reporters analyzed temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) climate database to create a map showing one of the nation's "hot spots." 3.6 degrees F warmer, twice the global average.

Much of the warming in the region and elsewhere has occurred during winter and spring and at night, and average minimum temperatures in the Great Lakes region have warmed by 5 to 10 degrees over the past 30 years. The last frost in the spring is also coming earlier than it did three decades ago, and the first frost in the fall is coming later, making the growing season one to two weeks longer, depending on where you are.

Across the country, similar trends ripple through events like the annual Tulip Festival in Bella, Iowa. From 1936 to 2001, dates felt as timeless as gospel: the second weekend in May. But after holding a series of festivals with beds of bare stems that had come and gone, city leaders moved the event dates back a week. "We've had perfect tulips for the last three years," Bella's director of history, Val Van Kooten, said in April of this year. "Last year we had a trifecta: tulips at their peak, flowering trees and beautiful weather."