What is the environmental history of plants?

What is the environmental history of plants?

In addition to what we do horticulturally, it is important to consider past environmental events. How harsh have recent winters been, and how does this match up to a particular plant’s hardiness range? Also, severe freezes in a given year can result in plant dieback and death well into a growing season.

Often clients think if a plant flowers normally or leafs-out normally, then all is well with regard to surviving winter damage. Sometimes, bud tissue breaks; however, early freeze damage to a plant’s cambium prevents that plant from growing beyond that initial bud break, and stems, or the entire plant, may die. These symptoms of delayed winter injury are quite common in cherries, as well as other Prunus selections.
Plants may also bud out and look fairly normal well into late spring and early summer, then hot weather occurs, and the underlying damage to the cambium causes dieback to occur. This type of problem again highlights the separation in time of the cause of damage and the obvious symptoms of this injury that make diagnosis such an art.

If a plant is known to have difficulty under droughty conditions, early hot, dry weather in a given season can have major effects on plants such as turfgrass and tender perennials, including Ligularia and Astilbe. Severe drought in past years should be factored into the current condition of certain drought-sensitive trees, such as beech. How a plant responds to particular additional stress depends upon its entire horticultural and environmental history.