Early Spring

It's still pretty cool in DC so I'm not quite sure what the lilacs are doing here but this book sounds like an interestineg read.

[Correction: My wife reminded me that she pointed lilacs out to me over the weekend and that I smelled them. Looks like it's an early Spring in DC too!]

From RealClimate...

Did you know that in 1965 the U.S. Department of Agriculture planted a particular variety of lilac in more than seventy locations around the U.S. Northeast, to detect the onset of spring — in turn to be used to determine the appropriate timing of corn planting and the like?

The records the USDA have kept show that those same lilacs are blooming as much as two weeks earlier than they did in 1965. April has, in a very real sense, become May.

This is one of the interesting facts that you’ll read about in Amy Seidl’s book, Early Spring, a hot-off-the-press essay about the impacts of climate change on the world immediately around us – the forest, the birds, the butterflies in our backyards.