Trees are generally very conservative in their growth habits. They often go to extremes to avoid rare events such as an early frost or severe drought. This is especially true of shoot growth. Although we think of trees as growing all summer, most trees only grow in height for a few weeks. Flowering dogwood sets […]
We think of summer as the “growing season” and we are used to our garden plants growing all summer. For most trees, though, growth takes place mostly in the early spring. Most trees in temperate regions produce a single flush of growth – the bud opens, and leaves that were formed the previous year expand […]
Part 1 described the unusual shoot growth pattern of trees this year. Here we discuss why this happened. Everyone realizes that this was an usual summer in eastern North America. We had a mild summer and a remarkable amount of precipitation. This graph (click for full size) is from the NOAA Climate At A Glance […]