Cory's Baked Native Garden

Today was the hottest June day in Washington, DC in recorded history, at 104 degrees F.  It's been over 100 degrees F. for a couple of days now here in Northern Virginia, and I'm watching as my native garden bakes. Leaves are drooping, flowers are turning brown, and not even early morning watering perks them up. I'm watching four years of planning, purchasing, planting and nurturing native plants as they wilt, and I'm wondering if they will be hardy enough to withstand this assault. I'm hoping that, as natives accustomed to this climate, they have programmed in their genetic code a mechanism to protect themselves from this dry heat.  And if the leaves and flowers don't hang on, will there be time this season for the plants to grow new leaves and flowers?

I tout the benefits of growing native plants to my neighbors, and one of the selling points I use is that the plants don't need as much care, don't need as much water, don't need fertilizer, because they have adapted to our soil and climate over thousands of years. I guess what we're going to see is how well they handle an extended period of dry heat.

We just got hit with a frightening and severe thunderstorm tonight, a rare weather event called a Derecho, which is sort of a long, horizontal tornado, fueled by dry heat on the front side and cooler rain on the back side. The derecho caused a huge, multi-state swath of downed trees, deaths and power outages. Hundreds of thousands of households, businesses and government agencies lost power for days. We were very lucky in our home to have no damage, but there were trees snapped off like toothpicks, with at least 5 trees blocking streets within 5 blocks of our house.  We hosted one family seeking refuge from their unbearably hot house, and others stopped by to charge phones and cook food to use it up before it went bad.  Actually, I observed a great deal of  camaraderie and cooperation among neighbors over the last few days.  The storm brought the temperature down about 20 degrees in 20 minutes, but the temperatures are going to stay in the mid- to high 90s for the next nine days. Poor plants. Poor bugs. Poor birds. Poor mammals.  We shall see how this all turns out.