to look on the bright side, my last summer collected larch's buds have shown me a sign of life, you can barley tell, but I stare at them so much I can tell there is some internal movement. jack pines are a nice new vibrant shade of green, and the ERC's are getting less purple.
hop hornbeams, birch, and american hornbeams are all fat and green here, wild honey suckle's and cherry's are poppin.. elms seem to be staying dormant.. great thing about the hack berry is that they are always pretty much the last tree to wake up, which is nice because it opens up the collection window to focus on the early risers.
we had a guest lecture and grafting demo at our clubs meeting the other day from this guy who was a propagation nut, he didn't seem to care at all about bonsai, but he had the same passion for grafting and collecting grafts from natural hybrids as we do for our bonsai, (he has named multiple new species, hastalavista, and the cousin, hasta la vista-baby) this guy is what a refer to as a "tree guy", and full of valuable knowledge. I picked up a few useful tidbits from his ramblings about his research with quantum physics (lol) relating to trees and their photo period sensors, and one thing he mentioned which I think is worthy to note is that the trees do know about the movements of the earth and sun cycle through the amount of light they detect. this guy has light intensity sensors measuring the suns's intensity throughout the year,(he uses LED's to increase graft success rates) and went on to say that if you look at the cell structure of any tree, the entire tree is made up of basically light sensors, the bark, heartwood, everything. what he said was that they (the trees) are being only slightly tricked by the warmth, but they know full well its not time due to the intensity of the suns rays. take from it what you will.. obviously there are factors in bonsai which negate these ideas, leaves will freeze of course, but for me tending mostly natives, I'm not quite as worried about the situation.
