🌾Plants know more than you or I.

Sunrise over a vineyard

Written and edited by Tammy 3nd February 2023

Daylight savings, you’re either a lover or a hater. And those that hate it will tell you loud and clear, but me….I’m a lover! I literally count down the sleeps till ‘that time of the year’ when I can still have hours of playtime out in the garden after work.

While we’re adjusting alarms, coffee breaks, and morning routines, our gardens carry on as if nothing’s changed. Long before humans fiddled with time, plants were quietly tuned into the sun, the seasons, and their own inner clocks. They don’t care if we flip numbers forward and backward to suit ourselves season after season, they respond to light, temperature, and day length. Their circadian rhythms (yes, plants have them too!) mean leaves unfurl, flowers open, and sap rises in tune with sunrise and sunset, not our human schedules.

That’s why you’ll see your sunflowers still turning their heads with the sun tomorrow, even if you feel groggy from losing an hour’s sleep.

Photoperiodism, one of those big fancy words, it’s the terminology given to a plants ability to regulate its development based of the hours of daylight. A chemical within plants called Florigen tells the plant 'The days are getting shorter, time to hurry up and stop putting on foliage and focus on reproduction before time runs out'.

With deciduous trees, we get all those beautiful Autumn colours .....that's a direct result of the chlorophyll in the leaves breaking down as the days shorten. The pretty colours were there all along, you just couldn't see them because of the chlorophyll. Without leaves, the tree loses its ability to photosynthesise and keep doing its thing, so it shuts down (becomes dormant) and goes to sleep for the season. As soon as the ground begins to warm, and the days begin to lengthen it signals the plants to wake up and the cycle begins all over again.

As gardeners, we can learn something from this:

• Nature keeps time better than we do.

• Plants don’t rush, they adapt gently to seasonal changes.

• Our role is to notice these cues: bud swell, sap flow, soil warmth, leaf drop.

So when you’re out in the garden this week, adjusting your own clock, take a moment to watch how your plants adjust to the real timekeepers: the sun and the seasons.

Happy gardening😘🌳