Location Rules

Weather: Some warm afternoons, but the winds begin soon after it’s warm enough to be outside.
Last useful rain: 10/04. Week’s low: 23 degrees F. Week’s high: 73 degrees F in the shade.

What’s blooming: Scarlet flax, broom senecio, snap dragons, a few blanket flowers and plains coreopsis, one chocolate flower

What’s still green: Cholla cactus; leaves on Bradford pear, crab apples, Siberian elm, beauty bush, juniper, German iris, red hot poker, regular and garlic chives, tansy, bouncing Bess, pinks, sweet peas, pink evening primroses, sweet violets, coral bells, golden spur columbine, blue flax, green leaf five eyes, bindweed, vinca, Johnson Blue geranium, winecup mallow, Queen Anne’s lace, Mönch asters, yarrow, dandelions, purple coneflowers, chrysanthemums, lance leaf coreopsis, Shasta daisy, June, needle, and cheat grass

What’s still gray or gray-green: Leaves on Apache plume, fernbush, winterfat, snow-in-summer, catmint, Silver King artemisia

What’s turning yellow: Leaves on cottonwoods, lilacs, Maximilian sunflowers, goldenrod

What’ turning orange: Leaves on peaches, choke cherries

What’s turning red or purple: Leaves on woods rose, sandcherries and purple leaf sandcherry, purple leaf plum, leadplant

Tasks: Finished clipping dead wood from the Siberian pea, and moved on to the lilacs. They have been neglected for a number of years, and the dead wood turns too hard to cut easily.

Animal sightings: Small birds, small gecko, grasshoppers, ants

Weekly update: It’s not Herbert Spencer’s survival of the fittest that defines what survives the first cold temperatures, but the realtor’s "location, location, location!"

Temperature fell to 23 degrees a week ago Friday, and then went down to 18 on Saturday. Nothing prepared the floral world. The lowest it had been was 33, and that was almost a week before.

Anything that was exposed was killed: leaves on trees, stems on herbaceous perennials, and most annuals from warmer climates.

But not everything. Grape leaves along the top rails of fences along the main road died, but not those lower to the ground. The outer leaves of one person’s datura died, but not those between the dead leaves and the stone wall.

Wherever there was a heat sink, something might survive. I have three apricots. The leaves on two, which stand by themselves along the gravel drive, died. The other is next to a juniper. All the leaves died, except those nearest the evergreen.

Because the preceding days were warm, the ground retained heat. Most of the green leaves mentioned in the above list are near the surface. Most of the chocolate flowers that grow over Saltillo tiles died, but the a few leaves on one growing in dirt survived. It produced a flower, barely visible behind the protective stems.

Species does make a difference. The other plants that still have flowers are ones adapted to cold climates, like snapdragons, or native ones that are used to climatic extremes like the purple asters and broom senecio.

Landscapers like to tell homeowners how they can exploit microclimates created in their yards by buildings and trees. They can’t control the even smaller nanoclimates made by plants themselves.

Notes on photographs: All were taken 20 October 2019.
1. Blanket flower (Gaillardia grandiflora).
2. Chocolate flower (Berlandiera lyrata) growing close to the ground.
3. Apricot (Prunus persica) protect by a one-seeded juniper (Juniperus monosperma).