The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (in Technicolor)

Weather: Mornings have been very cold, and afternoons only get above 50 in the afternoon. Saturday, it was comfortable to walk in sunny areas, but not ones in the shade. My hands began to get cold after about 20 minutes.

Last useful snow: 10/27. Week’s low: 11 degrees F. Week’s high: 65 degrees F in the shade.

What’s still green: Cholla cactus; leaves on privet, juniper and other evergreens, Japanese honeysuckle, yuccas, red hot poker, chives, grape hyacinth, tansy, bouncing Bess, pinks, sweet peas, pink evening primroses, golden spur columbine, snapdragons, blue flax, green leaf five eyes, hollyhock, winecup mallow, Queen Anne’s lace, anthemis, yarrow, purple aster, dandelions, June, needle, and cheat grass

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

What’s still red: Leaves on woods and pasture roses

Tasks: Before it turned cold, I 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: Goldfinches on Maximilian sunflowers, chickadees

Weekly update: My sense of normal temperatures in New Mexico is that it gets very cold just before the winter solstice and very warm before the summer one. Very cold means below 20, and temperatures remain cool into January. Summers are always hot, but usually in the 80s.

That pattern changed in the past few years. 2016 was a warm winter. It got down to 18 on November 30 and the coldest morning was 12 on January 7. The next year was dry and cold. It went down to 10 on November 26, and the coldest day was 5 on December 12. Last year was a bit better: temperatures fell to 17 on November 9 an the coldest day was 2 on January 27th.

This year we had a normal spring; it didn’t get really hot until June 25, and then afternoon temperatures were in the 90s through the first week in September. We went from mid summer to early fall, bypassing late summer when the annuls bloom and produce seed.

Then, on October 11 we went from early fall to early winter, with no late fall. Trees did not get the gradual messages to prepare for winter, and slow their metabolisms. Instead, morning temperatures went from the low 20s to 18. They rose into the 20s for days, then hit the occasional 18. This week temperatures dropped to 16 on October 29, 15 on Halloween, 11 on Friday and 18 on All Souls’ Day.

No autumn color. Leaves died and fell in masses. When I walked around yesterday, leaves on some, like the sandcherries that had turned red, fell as soon as they were touched.

This year the anomalies in temperature coincided with problems in areas far removed from this high mountain country. Temperatures had fallen into the 80s in the second week of August, presaging a normal transition into late summer. Then Hurricane Dorian began forming in the Atlantic on August 23, and on the 25th our temperatures returned to the 90s and stayed there until the hurricane finally dissipated on September 7.

Our cold weather was preceded by high winds that accompanied the fronts. In California, the utilities started cutting power in anticipation of Santa Ana winds on October 9. That was more than a week before we got high winds on October 17. Winds there continued. We got four days of high winds starting a week ago Saturday, and then the severely cold mornings.

The year has been one of traveling smoke. In May we started getting smoke from fires in México that lasted until the first hurricanes formed in the Pacific in late June. Then, during the worst of the winds we got smoke from California. Since Thursday it has been going north.

One begins to think about what climate change looks like. Some nursery catalogs advertise one can now grow zone 6 plants like azaleas because the USDA map shows average winter temperatures warming. That may be true on the east coast and at low elevations.

Here, we’ve had two years without many late summer annual flowers. They won’t die out, because, of course, they aren’t natives. The seed is grown in warmer climates and sold here. They will continue to thrive elsewhere.

It won’t be a return to the Carboniferous Age of Ferns either. The plants of early summer like bouncing Bess, pink evening primroses, and golden spur columbine did very well. Then in early fall, they grew everywhere after temperatures cooled.

I think of them as sub-alpine although most really are lower elevation plants. I used the term incorrectly to refer to plants that thrive in cool temperatures.

They’ll keep our corner of the world green when plants that can’t handle the extremes either die or go dormant in the summer. It won’t become a landscape of sere browns, but it also may not be one where corn, melons, and tomatoes do well.

When I looked around at what still was green in my yard yesterday, it was an inventory of those invaders that were shoving everything aside this past September. Many, like golden spur columbine and cliff roses, were native to this area. Others were varieties imported from the north, like Cheyenne privet and Queen Anne’s lace.

Many were bulbs, like the grape hyacinths, or had thick, fleshy, deeply-buried roots like the yuccas and hollyhocks. Many produce seeds, but the perennials can survive for a few years without reproducing. They don’t need to adapt to the atmospheric changes. They did that eons ago.

Notes on photographs: Taken 2 November 2019.
1. Cliff rose (Purshia mexicana).
2. Cheyenne Privet (Ligustrum vulgare).
3. Fernbush (Chamaebatiaria millefolium).

End notes:
Wikipedia. "2019 Atlantic Hurricane Season"

Olga R. Rodriguez and Janie Har. "California Faces Historic Power Outage Due to Fire Danger." Associated Press 8 October 2019. WSB television website, Atlanta.