There Is No "Right Time"

Southern crabapple - August 8 2021

Folks frequently comment to me about plants that bloom at the "wrong time", like there is such a thing.  There really isn't. Plants bloom when it is right to them - not us.  To be fair, most plants base this on a complex set of conditions and this leads to them blooming at a certain time of year.  It is evolutionarily important that they do.  Imagine the chaos that would be caused by having every flowering plant flowering at the same time.  The competition for pollinators would be overwhelming if they did. Then, the time gap between feast and famine for the pollinators would be too great to sustain them. The system would collapse.  As my mother used to recite regularly: 'to each their own".... Pollinators and their flowering plants have evolved a highly complex relationship that requires that some flowers attract some pollinating species more than others and others attract different pollinators. They also spread the wealth out by season; some in the early spring all the way into late fall.  The reason a real pollinator garden has to be diverse is because of this. To be successful, we plant a diversity of flowering plants that bloom over the greatest time period possible - just like nature does.

For most plants, their primary bloom period is timed to the length of daylight.  Some are triggered by the increasing length of sunlight that comes with the change from winter to spring. Others are opposite and wait for day length to shorten as it does from summer to fall.  The length of daytime sunlight is not a good cue for tropical plants that have evolved where this does not change over the seasons, so truly tropical plants bloom whenever conditions suit them.  Most of Florida, however, is not tropical and plants use day length as their primary cue to flower. But day length is not the only cue and sometimes plants decide that it is time to flower in the "off season."

My southern crabapple (Malus angustifolius) is a good example of this. It often sets a few blooms after periods of reliable rains.  Over the past week, we've had over a foot of rain in a week's period of time. Sensing this increase of moisture, my crabapple must believe that it is a good time to risk sending a few children out in the world.  I once asked a group of third graders why they thought plants made flowers; the overwhelming answer was that they did so to please us... The concept of sex was something they were far too young to contemplate, but it would have been the correct answer - at least in some form or another.  Plants do not flower when it is unsafe to do so. In this regard, they are no different from us or any other animal.  Sunlight may be the primary driver for much of the process, but environmental conditions also have to be right.  Soils need to have the right fertility and moisture, for example.  Of course, a plant also needs to have reached sexual maturity. Again, no different from animals.  

There is an evolutionary advantage to throwing out a few flowers at an atypical time when other conditions are favorable for reproduction.  If a spring-blooming plant were to have experienced an uncommonly wet or dry spring, a few flowers later in the year might be the only outlet for offspring that year.  I have a few Symphyotrichum asters that produce a few flowers in late spring and early summer. Sometimes, these late-blooming asters are so late that nearly all of the pollinators in my landscape have settled down for the winter. These early blooms are sometimes the only viable seed that they will produce in a year.  Nature is not "wasteful" nor does it make many "mistakes."  We sometimes look at "off-season" flowering as a mistake.  We should not.  Right now, I'm enjoying the few "extra" flowers my crabapple is making this summer. I had thought the flowers would not be returning until next spring. I only hope that the pollinators in my landscape also find them intriguing and that my plant's efforts will be rewarded by fruit and the children it desperately wishes to leave behind.  We are not so very different in the final analysis.