Britain's spring flowers
are blooming all out of season – lilacs, daffodils
and camellias in November, crocuses in January.
The phenomenon is not restricted to Britain, though a new
analysis there says some blooming flowers may be endangered
by the earlier blooms, according to the Daily Telegraph.
It's no big secret why the plants are out of whack: The
climate is warmer. Across the globe, and certainly in the
United States, the growing season is longer, with the spring
thaw coming earlier and the fall freeze coming later. That
means blooming flowers are more apt to spring forth at the
wrong time.
There are two basic reasons that can be a problem. One,
a flower that blooms during early winter warmth will be
susceptible to frosts that follow. Two, the blooming is
out of sync with other natural occurrences that are reliant
in one way or another on each other. For instance, a flower
may bloom before the bee or butterfly that pollinates it
emerges, leaving the flower unable to reproduce and the
bug without a source of food.
This can upset the migrations of birds that, over millions
of years of evolution, have timed their flights to the emergence
of certain insects, leaving more than a few pretty flowers
at stake. The scientific study of the timing of natural
phenomena is called phenology, and while there's general
concern about how global warming will affect the natural
world by disrupting the evolutionarily calibrated rhythms
of the natural world, many of the specific consequences
are undocumented.
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