The author’s garden has demonstrated resiliency in the face of warmer weather. For example, the golden coreopsis pictured in the background died out in one part of the garden and reseeded itself and is thriving in another part.

“By looking at nature and how it deals with extreme conditions or events, we can find the answers we need.” 

— Tom Massey, “Resilient Garden: Sustainable Gardening for a Changing Climate,” 2023

In his book “Resilient Garden,” landscape designer and climate change activist Tom Massey mentions an interactive map that shows the anticipated climates of more than 500 cities across the world by the year 2050. According to the map Massey presented, Seattle’s average temperature will be 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer and will resemble the current climate in San Francisco.

Intrigued by this technology, I found another interactive map developed by environmental scientists Matthew Fitzpatrick and Robert Dunn that shows what temperatures will look like in 540 North American cities by 2080. If greenhouse gas emissions remain as high as they are today, the map displays that summers in Medford will become 12.1 degrees Fahrenheit warmer and 7.7% drier. Winters are expected to be 7 degrees warmer and 14.3% wetter.

According to the map, Medford’s climate in 2080 will resemble current weather conditions at the Rancho Tehama Reserve in California (USDA Hardiness Zone 9a), a community located 200 miles south of Medford and about 55 miles south of Redding.

When I looked up the weather history of the Tehama region (actually measured at the Redding airport), I learned that the average maximum temperature so far in June is 90 degrees; three days have seen triple digits (103, 105 and 106). Last year, Tehama hit 100+ F temperatures a total of 32 times during July (19 times) and August (13 times).

Compare those numbers with Medford: The average maximum temperature so far this month is 76 degrees (14 degrees cooler than Tehama) with zero days reaching triple digits. Last year, Medford hit 100+ temperatures a total of 7 times during July (3 times) and August (4 times), which is less than 25% of the extreme heat occurrences in Tehama.

I’d like to take a road trip to Tehama this summer to experience for myself what it might be like for Medford gardeners in 2080. Until then, suffice it to say that it will be quite different from what it’s like to garden here now.

Of course, climate changes between 2024 and 2080 will not happen all at once, but in incremental shifts that might not be easy to discern in real time. That said, I’ve noted several changes in my garden over the past 12 years that I attribute to warmer temperatures: two 65-year-old sycamore trees that shade my house have become heat-stressed and diseased; warmer winters have permitted more insect pests to overwinter and ravage spring seedlings in my raised vegetable beds; spring flowers are blooming earlier, before insects have emerged for foraging, thus reducing pollination.

I’ve lost several plants to heat stress, including heather, roses, grasses, yews, a plum tree and a Japanese maple. Other plants have succumbed from diseases they can’t fight off in their weakened condition. For example, some of my Madonna lilies have died after becoming infected with botrytis, a fungal pathogen that thrives when winters are warm and wet.

On the other hand, my garden also displays impressive resiliency, if I look for it. My sycamore trees have started to shed their first round of young, diseased foliage, and then they grow a second round of leaves after warmer, dryer weather arrives. I’ve witnessed plants that die off in one part of the garden reseed themselves and thrive in another part of the garden. I could swear some of my spring-blooming perennials are flowering longer, as if waiting for their pollinators to wake up.

When I started reading Massey’s book, I wondered how I could create a resilient garden. Now I realize that was the wrong question. Instead, I should be asking how my garden can teach me about resiliency. While humans have been bumbling around trying to decide if climate change is real or not and what, if anything, to do about it, the plants in my garden have already taken action to preserve their kind in a warmer world. What I need to do is open my eyes and my mind to what my garden is telling me.

One thing it’s telling me is that many of the plants in my garden will not survive in the anticipated local climate of 2080. Massey devotes a whole chapter to descriptions of resilient plants for different hardiness zones. It certainly makes sense to grow more plants that are listed specifically for Zones 8-9. For a gravel garden, in lieu of a front lawn, suggested plant choices for Zones 8-9 include small-flowered hesperaloe, autumn sage, Mexican feathergrass, rosemary, lavender, curry plant, Greek sage, California poppy, sea holly, asphodel and sempervivum.

Food forest plantings specifically for these zones include fig, bergamot, sunflowers, blue passionflowers and dill.

Massey also discusses key actions for resilient gardens: plant trees, reduce hardscaping materials and use more permeable materials, produce compost onsite, reduce reliance on fossil fuels and incorporate renewable technologies, greenscape roofs, fences and walls, include more food-producing plants in the landscape and design seasonal planting areas.

These are helpful human inputs toward garden sustainability; however, resiliency is part of the genetic makeup of plants. One of the things that makes our gardens resilient, I think, is that plants are innately attuned to the reality of impermanence. Nothing lasts forever in a world that’s always changing. Flowers don’t mourn the loss of their petals; instead, they make way for the fruit and the seeds that will come after they are gone.

As it turns out, resiliency is a fitting topic this week. After 10 years and 500 articles about gardens and gardening in the Rogue Valley, this will be my last column. In the course of my work, I have had the pleasure of meeting many wonderful gardeners and their gardens, and I’ve learned more about gardening than I ever thought I would. I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading the columns over the years and that they’ve inspired you and made you smile from time to time.

Also, I hope you will join me in allowing our gardens to show us that we don’t need to develop resiliency to face the challenges ahead. Like the plants we grow, resiliency is already a part of our DNA, which has allowed homo sapiens (“wise humans”) to adapt to changes for 300,000 years. We need only to reclaim our resilience and use it to make wise choices about the direction in which we want the next 56 years, until 2080, to go.

This is Rhonda Nowak’s final “Garden Plots” column for the Rogue Valley Times.