From Your Health Journal…..”As most of you know, I am a huge fan of the Take Part web site, as they have so many wonderful articles, I am always plugging them. Today, I found a great article there from Alison Fairbrother called, Turns Out, Climate Change Is Also an Enemy of Flowers and Happiness. Climate change is causing may flowers to bloom earlier than expected. Some intrepid farmers and gardeners have begun mitigating frost damage with smudge pots, windmills, and even electric heaters to keep their crops from freezing during “false springs.” Now, some of you are staying, how is this article health related to your blog? Well, for many people like myself, we look forward to springtime. Blooming flowers are a sign of new life and beauty. Some people look forward to this as a sign of hope and happiness. If flowers that bloom die too soon from spring frost, it has a negative effect on our emotional levels, for some, even depression. So, it is a concern for many. The author of the article did a fantastic job. Please visit the Take Part web site (link provided below) to read and support the full article.”

From the article…..

A new study says that flowers are blooming detrimentally early due to climate change.

Those of us in the chilly Northeast might be cranking up the heat and praying for bursts of spring green, but for many plants in the eastern United States, spring is coming a little too soon.

Exceptionally warm weather in recent years caused plants to flower earlier than usual. In fact they’re flowering sooner than they have at any point in the last 150 years, according to a study published this week in PLOS ONE.

Researchers identified plants in Massachusetts and Wisconsin that bloomed three weeks earlier than they did when they were first observed, with some species of plants flowering up to six weeks earlier.

These early bloomers have a predictable culprit. In his interview with TakePart, Charles Davis, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard and the study’s senior author says, “Early flowering times, as far as we can tell, are due to climate change.”

For now, many plants appear to be adapting to the rise in temperature. But botanists are questioning how long it will be before plants can no longer adjust to increasingly early spring temperatures. “Even things that are benefitting are shifting so much out of their normal schedule that they are missing common associations that they would have in nature, like primary insect pollinations, or primary dispersers that move their fruits and seeds around,” Davis says.

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