03/13/2024

You Aren't Crazy

Spring is getting earlier

Ken Lyons, 77, knows when strawberry plants used to bear fruit in Lebanon, N.J. In the 1980s, strawberries came within a few days of his son’s birthday on June 11. These days, Lyons’s strawberry plants peak in May. When his son, now 45, visited home for his birthday a few years ago, he was disappointed to find the strawberries already gone.

Michael Dornbrook, 71, knows when the magnolia trees used to bloom in Boston. As a student at MIT in the early 1970s, he remembers seeing their pink and white petals on his way to take his final exams in the second and third week of May. Now the magnolias often bloom in April.

As global warming nudges temperatures higher, memories of the past offer an informal account of how the seasons have changed. A formal account comes from the USA National Phenology Network — phenology is the study of seasonal change — which reports the annual appearance of spring’s first leaves in the contiguous United States since 1981.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.