hey when plants do weird things.. after extreme weather.. my first thought is some type of survival mechanism related to the stressors ... in other words.. they were struggling in the heat wave and now they are trying real hard to put out seed to survive ... never forget that the flower is simply a mechanism to produce the seed for the ultimate survival of a normal plant .... [leaving out of the discussion hybrids that are sterile.. though still have the genes for reproduction, even if they cant ...] make sense?? ken ps: plants obviously can NOT be confused ... so we have to think about what it might be doing in relation to its simple survival .... sprout, grow, flower, seed .... not much left in that continuum ..... so i surmise that growth was interrupted... and now that it has returned toward normal ... flowering and seeding is back to top priority ... though a bit out of the normal season ....

Ditto GardenGal's comments. To me the bottom line is not to be afraid of failure. Certainly you don't want to be removing a lot of huge dead trees from your garden after a hard winter. Some ideas are also just plain unrealistic (like the guy who expects coconut palms to grow in Seattle if he just keeps on trying - ha.) But plants will always perform better or worse than expected and there will always be pleasant and unpleasant surprises after a hard winter. To me, if my gardening style isn't flexible enough to account for those surprises and absorb a certain degree of risk, that takes a lot of the fun out of it - especailly as there are so many cool plants that are hardier than many nurserymen and books realize. A lot of useful weather data can be found at the Western Regional Climate Center: http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/Climsum.html The information necessary to calculate your USDA zone isn't provided, but what is provided is a more complete climate picture that is at least as useful, including record lows, averages, precipitation, etc. I haven't looked at the weather.com site but their numbers sound suspect to me. The WRCC data is from official NWS records. Olympia's all time low was -8F on January 1, 1979. Klamath Falls appears to be -17F in 1972. (Interesting side note - according to the Oregon Plant Atlas (google it), madronas can be found as far up/inland as the Crater Lake area (as is chinkapin) - I'm sure plants of that provenance would do fine in Klamath Falls.) You're certainly right about microclimates - they are much more variable than people realize, even over very short distances. When you find the all time record low for your area, it might not necessarily represent you. A fine example is the Olympia weather station, whose very cold winter temperatures don't really represent the rest of the area. I can tell this just by looking at some of the plants around town (eucalypts etc) after a hard winter. When I lived on the north side of Olympia, I usually had overnight temperatures 10-15 (in one instance 20) degrees warmer than those recorded at the airport during those cold arctic events. Another example of this sort of thing was during the Feb 2006 freeze when in the same night, Tacoma Narrows airport had a low of 32F and McChord, a short distance away, bottomed out at 12F.

Same problem over here. Just about all of my spring bulbs are popping out of the ground to say "hello." Even one of my daisys are leafing out due this warm weather. Little do they know the weatherman is calling for 2 to 4 inches of snow. Squirrels are messing with them too! Oh well, just need to pray that they'll make it through the winter ok.

Most def not a Larix, and definitely a white pine. Larix needles are always single, whether alternating on long shoots or rosettes on spurs. I have a big Prince-rupprecht larch at my parents’ property in NE Ohio that has done well. At one time I had all three varieties of gmelinii there and the hybrid x czekanowskii (russica x gmelinii). I lost gmelinii var. japonica...but one still exists, I think, at Holden.