When it comes to the weather, we gardeners are prone to hyperbole.  Every season, one would think from listening to us, is drastically colder or warmer, wetter or drier than ever before.  Has one of us ever said, “Can you believe what normal weather we’re having?” or, “Average enough for ya?”  Instead, we seize upon every irregularity in the weather and hold it up as evidence of the capriciousness of nature.  In doing so, we fail to notice the underlying order that does pervade the gardening year.  We focus on and remember the ice storms and late freezes and early thaws, rather than acknowledge the more numerous “normal” periods throughout the year.

Consequently, we are also reluctant to believe that bloom times–which are most directly influenced by weather–are predictable with any sort of precision by looking at the calendar.  Each year is different, we say.  We satisfy ourselves with vague terms like “blooms in early spring” or “blooms in late summer, ” because we believe that’s as accurate as we can be.  The dates can fluctuate wildly from year to year, you know.

I began recording bloom times in the Cincinnati area in 1996.  It began innocently enough as a simple blooming calendar, to help myself in the orchestration of blooming combos in my own garden, but it morphed into an obsession.  Nearly every week for 16 years I traveled to local gardens, parks, and arboreta and photographed and took notes on hundreds of varieties of plants (1,200 all together), including trees, shrubs, vines, perennials, grasses, bulbs, and annuals.