I am getting smoke from Zaca fire also. Just started getting it yesterday here. I suppose it could affect plants. I don't see why it couldn't.
The eclipse is on the 28th.

Right you are!

August 28th for the Lunar Eclipse.

September 11th for a partial Solar Eclipse.

Of course, an even bigger natural disaster affecting plants is the flooding in Texas. Talk about the potential for root rot!

I was watching something on the boob tube the other day about various varieties of Oak in California and it showed the decline in new tree survivability over the past years and oddly enough, credited additionial rain fall with causing more desease in the trees.

Water is good, but too much is bad.

Wow! The spathe of quakes and tectonic events keeps growing.

08/20 6.5 Off the Philipine Islands
- Volanic Eruption North of Java in Indonesia

8 days to go till the eclipse and then, after a pre-eclipse build-up, will there be a post eclipse, wind-down?

BTW: In the Palm and Cycads Forum, they are praying for the mortality of Palm Trees to be killed by Hurricane Dean. But fear not! Somebody did ask, "What of the people that will suffer?" And no that doesn't mean that their Washys will go through mutation and bring to reality "The Night of The Trifids", dooming people to horrible zombified enslavement to a palm tree race.

Trivia: Did you know that Erol Flynn's Sailing Yatch was named "Zaca" and that he experienced a fierce Carribean Storm and wound up in Jamaica while sailing her? Land of Palm Trees, for sure!

Sorry ... I kind of lost my mind for half a second.

I guess I'm still upset about my Yucca Tree cloning experiment being derailed ... an unnatural disaster, but one that I will have to wimper about for a while and then get on with life.

:)

Is Santa Barbara a zone 9??

Santa Barbara ( The City ) is in Zone 10. The County is in 9/10.

FYI: At the top menu bar for Garden Web, there is a 'Tools & Directories' pull down with a 'Zone Finder' selection.

I had my suspicions about something else besides the upcoming Lunar eclipse that might be a causal participant in the recent spathe of earthquakes. The launch of the Phoenix Lander to Mars had me wondering how close Mars was to Earth and whether, both planets were near perihelion, the closest part of their orbits to the sun.

An article at Space.com confirmed not only that both planets are approaching opposition, their closest distance to each other, but that the Earth and Mars are in fact in opposition and are now nearing their closest point to each other. And this will be almost simultaneous with the Lunar Eclipse.

The gravitational stress equation is then this ...

( Sun - Moon - Earth - Mars )

No wonder there has been this build-up of quakes! It is not just due to the coming Lunar Eclipse.

My My My!

This could prove exciting!

I'm in Santa Barbara County, in Solvang. I've lived here for under a year. Though this website and others call this zone 9, it gets pretty darn chilly up here in the winter. However, perhaps last winter, an exceptionally cold one, was not the right one to judge zones by. My local nursery, 2 miles away in the next town over, categorized us as being 8B.
The Zaca fire continues to burn. The other day the ash in the air made it look like it was snowing. We've been more fortunate up here, though, as the winds have brought the lion's share of smoke and ash up and over the pass to blanket Santa Barbara. Fire crews predict containment by the first or second week of September. Hopefully we'll get more rain this winter!

Dara

Oops, had the arrangement wrong ...

( Sun - Earth - Moon - Mars )

NOT

( Sun - Moon - Earth - Mars )

So there you have it folks. The eclipse has come and gone with no significant earthquake having occurred.

However ... I think we can view the theory still out to lunch as we just had a whole series of quakes that likely loosened up any stresses built up and those quakes may have had more to do with the Earth passing through Mars' gravity wake as it catches up to meet Mars in opposition in December. Odd thing is that following that spathe of Rim of Fire Quakes, things are realatively seismically quiet now.

Elsewhere ...

The Zaca fire is nearly contained and maybe, all the flooding around the world will ameliorate as Autumn begins. BKF has even seen cumulus clouds in the past day, but I doubt we'll get rain.

I'm really surprised that nobody chimed in with a comment about Global Warming in this thread, what with the droughts in the US Southeast, the flooding and the deadly heat waves. I'm sure there are some wilted peonies somewhere and to the point, that's really going to be the Natural Disaster generator that is and will be effecting Earthly Paradise and any Garden of Eden, small or large.