It’s fall in the Valley, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s the middle of summer listening to the weather reports.
For several years in a row now, summer temperatures have extended well into October for the Phoenix area, and it’s not just affecting Arizonans — it’s taking a toll on the desert’s botanical life, too.
While arid climate and hundred-degree temperatures are nothing Arizona’s plant life hasn’t seen before, they haven’t been able to adapt quickly enough to the hotter, longer and drier summers we’ve had in recent years.
Katie Ann Franklin is the program director for V&P Nurseries in Queen Creek, and she said one of the factors affecting plants both in nurseries and in the wild is the hotter nights.
“When you also have evenings that don't cool down, and you have this extended heat — a lot of it from concrete — it really impacts the overall health of the plant because they don't receive that break that they're supposed to get at nighttime to be able to recoup," Franklin said.
When they’re faced with this much heat without the chance to cool down, plants begin to release stress signals that attract bugs, said Franklin. Those bugs then make the plant more susceptible to disease.
“So we're actually seeing, even in the nursery itself, with these extended summers, that because the plants don't have that natural cool down period, they're exposed to more diseases. And that's not something that is easy to come back from," Franklin said.
Franklin said Arizona has a unique biome, being able to support both native desert plant life and subtropical plant life.
The subtropical plants, she said, are attractive to people migrating to the Valley from California and other places with more lush and colorful plants — but they’re what she calls “adapted” to the climate.
The past several summers haven’t just been hotter than usual though; they’ve also been drier than usual — the Valley is actually supposed to receive two rain cycles: one in the summer (our monsoon season) and one in the winter.
“Because we're having these extended summers,” Franklin said, “it's not providing native or adapted material with the water that is necessary for them to be able to withstand such temperatures.”
All these factors combine with the fact that Arizona is facing water shortages. Franklin said water conservation is “an everyday conversation” at the nursery, and said that V&P is lucky to have a diverse group of water sources available to them in Queen Creek.
She also said V&P is working on developing new varieties of plant that are more drought-resistant.
“So across the state, we're really working together to figure out what those varieties are that are going to be able to thrive in the years to come as we continue to get hotter and hotter and we face the reality of water in the state,” she said.
Extended summer heat isn’t just affecting the plants that are already alive, though. Franklin said nurseries are trying to ensure that they don’t have any issues with winter plants being planted later than normal, but that customer demand may change with the heat as well:
“Because we really function on being able to turn material quickly,” she said, “If there are any delays or if people think that it’s too hot for them to go out and shop, that creates a backup here.”
She continues, “So we're creating more and more material, but because we're live goods, those root systems can only last so long before the integrity of their botanical nature is compromised.”
And as nurseries like V&P work to create more drought-resistant plants that can thrive in our hundred-degree Octobers, Franklin said her hope is that people come to appreciate and take a vested interest in the plants that make up the biome around them.
“We really want people to be engaged in the land that they're living on. It's our responsibility to be able to take care of the plants that give so much back to us.”
One thing she said people can do to help plants they might have that are suffering from the extreme heat is to plant shade trees —the trees will offer shade to plants underneath them, and cause the ground to be cooler.
After all, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
