Local perspective - 4 seasons: summer, summer, summer, ski

CNN perspective - 4 seasons: fire, flood, landslide, earthquake

:^)

LOL,and when do each season start&end?

You can look at it two ways:

There's the dry season and the rainy season. The rainy season is November to April, with most of the rain coming in January, February, and March. The best time to plant non-tropicals is October and November, when the weather has cooled off but the soil is still relatively warm, and the winter rains are approaching (hopefully). The dry season is May to October. During the dry season you water and stay out of the garden during the heat of the day. In June you plant your tropicals like bougainvillias and citrus trees. As far as annuals go, you plant pansies and snapdragons and sweet peas in the fall, not the spring, because they prefer the cooler weather.

The other way to look at it is indeed Spring, Summer, etc. and they do follow the calendar, pretty much, March 21 is the start of spring, June 21 is the start of summer, and so on. Spring is when most things are blooming and the lawns look good. Summer is when you stay out of the sun between about 9am and about 4pm. Fall things start looking good again, plants start growing again because it is cooler, everything perks up a bit, except when the Santa Ana winds blow. Winter is when the California natives are growing due to the rains (hopefully) and otherwise the plants slow down quite a bit due to the shorter days--less is going on except the Camellias and Cymbidiums are in bloom and it rains (hopefully).

Around here, things start growing around March 1 or so, a few weeks before spring starts, and all the plants recover from the heat of summer and get going again starting right after Labor Day, so the season dates from the calender bend a little.

the non-glib answer...
Hoovb is spot on: either we expect rain (winter) or it's front page news (non-winter), and then warm vs. cool evenings. In general, humidity is comfortable to cat-sparky (santa ana conditions). The traditional 4 seasons don't really apply that way it does in most of the country. When planting, I anticipate either cool and short days evenings (peas, lettace) or hot and long days(tomatoes), or pre-rain (plant natives, aussies) or pre-warm days (tropicals, bananas, citrus).

All this slicing and dicing becomes significant when planting, but also flowering. In eastern gardens, summer is lush. In my drought tolerant garden, I had to plan carefully to have flowers in mid-summer. In winter, my garden blazes with wildflowers - quite opposite the rest of the country.

as an aside, why did you ask? =^,,^=