What your garden can teach you about a warmer world

Eight years ago, I planted three red tart cherry trees in my backyard. And as much as it pains me as a proud gardener to write this, they were scrawny little things for most of that time, no matter what I did to pump life into their veins.

The specimens began as one-foot saplings, shipped to me by the Arbor Day Foundation, a Nebraska City-based nonprofit group that promotes tree planting around the globe. Before this spring, the trees looked ready to die. They were thin. Their leaves were sparse. They produced little fruit. And, well, they just looked sick.

More than once I considered putting them out of their misery. They’d only cost a dollar each, so their demise wouldn’t have been a major financial loss. But I love trees. I just didn’t have the heart to cut them down. And so they stayed, mucking up my landscape.

Then, suddenly this spring, the cherry trees exploded in unison, growing like crazy. Their trunks expanded exponentially. Their branches shot out every which way. Their leaf cover became full and dark green. And now there are cherries — hundreds of beautiful, plump cherries — covering each of the trees, ripening as I write.

What the heck happened? Here’s my simple theory: Because of all the rain this spring, they grew.

Right about now you’re probably saying to yourself, “Duh? It doesn’t take an agronomist to tell me that fruit trees, like all plants, need lots of water to grow.”

Allow me explain why this simple theory is far more complex than it first appears.

The Heralds’ copy editor, Jim Harmon, knows that I’m something of a global-warming freak. I fully embrace the much-maligned science of climate change. I believe the greenhouse gases that we produce from factories, power plants and cars are the root cause of global warming. And I believe we must significantly reduce our carbon emissions before the Earth heats to untenable levels.

Jim occasionally passes along climate-change-related articles that he thinks I’ll find of interest. The one he gave me last week — “A Warming Planet Struggles to Find New Ways to Feed Itself,” from the June 5 New York Times — astounded me.

It was part of a series the Times is calling “Temperature Rising,” which is “focusing on the central arguments in the climate debate.” I found the piece remarkable first because it accepted human-induced climate change as a given, without the equivocation that is so common in American mainstream media. Climate-change deniers did not receive equal treatment in the article, as they so often do. In fact, they received no treatment whatsoever.