[ Massachusetts’ coldest days not nearly so cold.]
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THE PLANTS TELL THE STORY  
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Sabrina Shankman
November 17, 2023
Boston Globe
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_ Massachusetts’ coldest days not nearly so cold. _

The latest USDA hardiness zone map shows the coldest extremes are
getting less extreme., USDA

 

When Tyler Caforio started doing landscaping work back in 2012, winter
meant plowing every weekend bundled up in a heavy coat as he added to
already sky-high snowbanks that refused to budge, thanks to persistent
cold.

Only 11 years later, that’s changed. A lot. If it snows, he can
usually toss on just a sweat shirt to go out for the day. And the
unfrozen ground quickly turns snow to slush, “like pudding on
asphalt ... it’s just a big mess,” he said.

Caforio’s business in Ashburnham, in north-central Massachusetts, is
in one of several parts of the state that have experienced a
pronounced shift in its winter temperatures. The latest proof of that
comes not in an academic finding or scientific report, but in an
update this week of the US Department of Agriculture’s plant
hardiness map [[link removed]] — a guide for
would-be planters wondering how much cold their plants need to
withstand.

Compared to the former map, which was from 2012 and looked at extreme
minimum temperatures from 1976 to 2005, the new map eliminates or
shrinks the coldest zones, reflecting a state that is transitioning to
a warmer climate. The new map looks at data from 1991 to 2020.

2023 Plant hardiness mapUSDA

Gone are the pockets across north-central and western parts of the
state where temperatures could be expected to hit 20 to 15 degrees
Fahrenheit below zero at least once in the winter. And while once
nearly half the state could expect to dip down to 15 to 10 degrees
below zero at some point each winter, only the far western and
north-central portions are now classified that way.

On its own, the transition shown by the plant hardiness maps could
seem like a good thing for home gardeners — a rare silver lining in
the doom and gloom of climate change. After all, what landscaper,
professional or amateur, wouldn’t like to hear that their plants
could fare better than in the past? Except (sorry) it’s not that
simple.

Climate change doesn’t just bring warmer temperatures. It also
brings more extreme weather and more variability — such as the
whiplash from Massachusetts’ record drought
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of 2022 to the extreme rains of 2023.

Francine Shear, owner of Echobrook Nursery in Worcester, said that’s
posing big risks for plants. “This year was a very rainy season for
the fall and we lost a lot of crops,” she said. But the year before,
the drought was particularly hard on plants. Worcester was among the
locations that the USDA maps indicated had experienced a shift in its
hardiness zone.

Caforio said he encountered this problem earlier this year. “We did
a big install — upwards of 100 plantings on this hillside,” he
said. Then came the extreme rains
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that dropped 11 inches in less than five hours in nearby Leominster.
“The plants uprooted out of the ground because they didn’t have
any root structure.” He suggested landscapers take the extra step of
staking down bigger plants, like shrubs, “or your profits will be
all over the yard.”

Another lesson learned: With a rainier summer in general, he needed to
cut lawns a quarter to a half-inch shorter so the grass was more
likely to dry completely in between rains, or risk growing moss.

This not-quite-so-frigid-winter-anymore trend can be seen nationally.
“Overall, the 2023 map is about 2.5 degrees warmer than the 2012
map,” said Christopher Daly, director of Oregon State University’s
PRISM Climate Group, which helped develop the map.

Still, it’s not definitively clear that the changes in the map are
yet another example of global warming, cautioned the USDA, because
some weather variability is natural.

But climate scientist Michael Rawlins, of the University of
Massachusetts Amherst, said the change is in line with how the
shifting climate is affecting the region. “There should be no doubt
that a warming climate attributable to human activities, namely the
burning of fossil fuels, is the dominant influence on these
changes,” he said.

It’s not just the minimum temperatures that are increasing, said
Edwin Sumargo, a climate scientist with the state’s newly formed
Office of Climate Science. “As we’ve seen in the weather patterns
this year, with climate change, we expect to see a long-term warming
trend in overall average temperature as well as the lowest temperature
each year,” he said. And while he said further study is needed to
attribute the change in the USDA maps to climate change, he noted that
with time “we will see the trend the USDA maps suggest more and more
clearly.”

Massachusetts’ average winter temperature has increased 3 degrees
since 1970, according to data
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compiled by independent research organization Climate Central. That
includes that crucial transition, the one from less snow to more
slush. In Massachusetts, the average winter temperature has been above
freezing for much of the past two decades.

Despite the new guidance from the USDA making it clear how
temperatures have shifted in the state, neither Shear nor Caforio, the
plant nursery owner and landscaper, suggested that Massachusetts
residents start changing their perennials out just yet.

“In the future, if it’s going to continue to get warmer and
warmer, we’ll be able to plant more kinds of plants,” Caforio
said.

But asked whether he expects to ever be planting palm trees?

“Not in my lifetime,” he said.

Sabrina Shankman can be reached at [email protected]. Follow
her @shankman [[link removed]].

* Climate Change
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* Massachusetts
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