On its binnamenit, we talked to up-and-comers and icons of culture.
From Barbara Streisand, you're such a wonderful interviewer.
To Tracy Ellis Ross, your questions were so wonderful and Christine Buransky.
Oh, thank you for your wonderful questions.
Here are the questions these icons loved to be asked.
Listen every week to its binnamenit from NPR.
You're listening to LifeKit.
From NPR.
I'm Regina Barber in For Maryl, Sagarra.
Gardening can be magical.
Planting a little baby plant and watching it grow into something with blooms or even fruit
you can eat, that's special.
And if you're giving these plants a lot of time and attention, you want to give them the
best shot of survival.
That's why many home gardeners use something called the Hardiness Zone map.
It basically says which plants will survive where.
But there's a big change to that map.
It last year, the USDA updated its Hardiness Zone map for the first time in over a decade.
So in gardening spaces, this is pretty big news.
If you're a nerd like me, you're like, whoa, what change?
That's Daniel Wood.
He's a graphics reporter at NPR and he wants to look into this change because he's also
a gardener.
Have it.
Have it's always the word.
This episode of LifeKit, Daniel's going to walk us through the changes on the USDA's
map.
Why it needs updating?
And we'll even get into what new gardening possibilities may exist in your neck of the
woods.
Support for this podcast and the following message come from Wise, the app that makes managing
your money in different currencies easy.
With Wise, you can send and spend money internationally at the Mid Market Exchange
rate.
No guesswork and no hidden fees.
Learn more about how Wise could work for you at Wise.com.
It's a high stakes election year, so it's not enough to just follow along.
You need to understand what's happening so you are fully informed on November.
Every weekday on the NPR Politics Podcast, our political reporters break down important
stories and back stories from the campaign trail.
Do you understand why it matters to you?
Listen to the NPR Politics Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
This message comes from the Pop Culture Moms Podcast.
Most friends, Andy and Sabrina take their obsession with TV and movies to the next level,
talking to celebrities about the comedy and tragedy of parenthood and the fictional moms
they love most.
Listen to Pop Culture Moms wherever you get podcasts.
Numbers that explain the economy.
We love them at the indicator for planet money and on Fridays we discuss indicators in the
news.
Like job numbers, spending, the cost of food, sometimes all three.
So my indicator is about why you might need to bring home more bacon to afford your eggs.
I'll be here all week.
Wrap up your week and listen to the indicator podcast from NPR.
Okay, so tell me more about the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone map.
What is it?
Well it's like a beautiful map with all these different colors, but what it basically
is.
You already sold me.
It's a widely used tool.
It's produced by the United States Department of Agriculture and it aims to help home gardeners
know what plants might survive the winter in their area.
Okay.
At its most basic level, it's simply a map that shows you your average low temperature.
So it's the average of the last 30 years going back to 1991.
And it's trying to answer the question, how cold is the coldest night of the year every
year at my house?
Okay.
It's really widely used.
If you go to like any plant nursery or garden center and you just flip over the tag,
it'll say something like, hardy to zone seven, hardy to zone eight.
Got it.
So why the particular interest to us now?
Right.
So back in November, the USDA updated their plant hardness map for the first time in more
than a decade.
About a quarter of the country moved into an entirely new zone.
There are 13 zones with one being the coldest and 13 being the warmest.
Warmest is like Puerto Rico places like that.
They don't get below 65 degrees on the average winter.
Okay.
I'm in zone seven.
That means I don't get below zero on the average winter.
Okay.
And Alaska, you have places that get as cold as negative 60 in the average winter.
That's quite the range.
Pretty chilly and not a lot grows up there as you can imagine.
Okay.
So about a quarter of the country has moved into a new zone.
Like why is that?
The truth is that we really don't know why these things are happening, but we can guess
that a lot of it is happening as a result of climate change.
There's also been a massive increase in the number of weather stations that they're using
to measure temperature across the country, but they don't really know for sure in a given
place is this warming happening as a result of climate change, is it better readings,
nobody really knows.
Generally though, we can say a lot of what is happening is a result of climate change.
Yeah.
And so like what's the reaction to this?
Like what do we do?
Right.
Well, when gardeners like me hear about these changes, it makes me want to know like can
I go out and buy a banana or a palm tree and put it in my yard and grow it?
I dove into this and found it.
It was a little bit more complex than I expected.
Okay.
Let's start with this.
This hardness map supposed to be used then by home gardeners.
Right.
So, one of the most basic risks to the plants in your garden is the cold.
So these zones are really created to help you make educated guesses about whether a given
plant will die on an average winter.
But it's not a one size fits all guide to know what exactly to plant.
At a basic level, it's just a risk assessment tool for understanding the odds of success
for different plants.
Okay.
So for home gardener, this would mean thinking about how cold weather
will affect any of their perennial plants, right?
Yes, exactly.
So, let's define a perennial.
Yeah.
This was a word that my mom threw around as a kid because she was a big gardener and I
was like, I could never keep it straight.
A perennial is a plant that you plant once and it survives year after year.
Think about like trees, bushes, so your cherries, your roses, your hydrangeas, your
azaleas, and further south climates.
You have your hibiscus, you've got cardinias, you've got sage, rosemary, thyme, those sort
of things.
We're not talking about the things you put in your vegetable garden every year.
Tomatoes or your peppers.
Okay.
These perennials live multiple years, so they need to be able to survive whatever winter
extremes your area might throw at it.
Let me give you an example.
Have you ever smelled jasmine?
Yeah, I had jasmine tea literally this morning.
Perfect.
Okay, so jasmine is like one of my favorite smells in the world.
Yeah, it's so good.
I love it.
It's a vine-rush shrub as we know and it's in our lingo, it's hardy to zones eight or
nine, which means it can be exposed to temperatures maybe down to 10 degrees, although it really
doesn't like it.
Okay.
Growing up, I would visit my grandparents in Oakland, California and this is the smell I associate
with those special memories.
Whenever I show up in Oakland, I still smell it.
It's like everywhere.
It's really rare in the DC area.
But with this, it's possible that maybe I can grow it now because parts of this area
were moved into zone eight, which means that we don't get below 10 very often.
So it's something that I can even maybe experiment with.
Wow.
Okay.
So, the USDA Hardiness Zone map not tell us then.
Well, first of all, it's not a crystal ball.
So remember that it's backward looking.
So if, let's say you're in zone eight and you only get down to 10 degrees on average,
that means that that's what happened for the last 30 years.
It doesn't mean that that's what's going to happen for the next 30 years.
The next 30 years might be a lot warmer.
There might be a lot more extreme.
Climate change is bringing a lot of extreme weather.
So you might get mostly temperatures that don't get below 15, but maybe one year it might
get to 10.
We have no way of knowing.
It also doesn't tell you anything about when to put plants in the ground or to so seeds.
Okay.
So for that, you would normally want to think about like what your last frost date is.
That's easy to find.
You can Google last frost date in my area.
And you will see it or you can look up first frost date in my area.
Depending on what you're planting, knowing those dates would be really helpful.
We talked to Todd Roundsaville, a horticulturalist with the USDA who was involved with creating
the map.
And here's what he said.
It is not intended to address things like early or late frost planting dates.
It doesn't get into the microclimates and the things that you can do to buffer plantings.
The main purpose of it is a risk assessment tool for that minimum low temperature average
through the winter.
So I mean, these are not all monex.
Let's not get those confused.
Exactly.
Similarly, there are a lot of other things that doesn't tell you.
It doesn't tell you anything about how much water your area gets or how much sun your
area gets.
So Todd makes this really interesting point that parts of Alaska, New Mexico and Pennsylvania
are all in zone seven, meaning they don't get below zero degrees on average.
But we know that like coastal Alaska is a rainforest.
It has extremely long summer days.
We know New Mexico is extremely dry and Pennsylvania is very temperate.
So you can kind of use your intuition and maybe talk to someone at the local nursery about
whether this big fat golden barrel cactus is the right thing to plant in June, Alaska.
It probably isn't.
But you never know.
Maybe it is.
I don't know.
Not even here in DC.
I like all my street.
There's this disgusting like dine cactus on the side of the road.
It's very sad.
They do that every winter and it'll perk back up.
Really?
Yeah.
Oh my god.
It looks water logged.
No, it's going to be fine.
Oh wow.
Okay.
Okay.
What about winter and the cold?
What about summer heat?
Like does the hardiness zone map tell us anything about that?
Unfortunately, no.
The map doesn't tell us anything about the summer.
There's not really a hard and fast way to determine whether something will survive in
your summer.
The American Horticultural Society tried to make something called the heat zone map in
the late 90s, but it really hasn't caught on.
Okay.
I was at a nursery recently and I only saw one plant tag reference it out of the dozens
that I checked.
Okay.
Sometimes you will see a maximum hardiness zone on a plant's tag in a nursery.
Like for instance, most apples need a cold period to set fruit.
Oh really?
I have no idea.
Yeah.
So above zone eight, they're really going to struggle.
But the good news is if you're somewhere that warm, you can probably grow citrus, which
is way more delicious.
Apples and oranges are not the same things.
Exactly.
But okay.
So what other metrics and advice should I use when planting and planting perennials then?
Right.
So I mean, some things are pretty intuitive, right?
We're thinking about where you plant something near your house.
How much sun does it get?
How wet is it?
How protected is it from the wind?
A lot of people don't think about wind, but something that's really exposed to the wind
is going to desiccate meaning that it's going to lose a lot of water.
Especially in the winter, this can be really, really hard on plants.
So like for instance, two winners ago in DC, we got below our normal hardiness zone into
the single digits Fahrenheit.
And I had this beautiful little rosemary plant in a pot and I had one in the ground.
The potted plant was out in the front yard.
It was exposed to all the elements.
When it got really cold, I didn't bring it in and it pretty quickly died.
The rosemary in the ground was a few years old.
It had deeper roots.
It was sheltered from the wind and it survived.
Wow.
Only a little bit of damage.
So where stuff is in your yard matters like a whole lot.
The other thing that the map doesn't talk about that you need to really think about is
the duration of cold in your area.
We talk to Andrew Bunting.
He's the vice president of Horticulture at the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society.
If you're naked and you run through a freezer, it's not going to kill you.
If you run into the freezer and have to stay there for an extended period of time, it's
probably going to kill you.
So you know, these drops where they may only drop for a night or maybe even two nights.
Sometimes that, especially with established plants, there may be superficial damage like
you might get leaves that are burned or maybe even some stems that die back, but it may
not be so catastrophic that it actually kills the plants.
So for the example of my rosemary, the established plant did much better.
The other one was left naked and alone in the in the right yard.
In the right yard freezer.
Okay.
So I'm going to become a gardener.
You've convinced me.
But let's start off a little bit more safe.
How can I plan out what's going to last in my new garden?
Right.
For a beginner, maybe you don't want to experiment and have stuff die because that can be really
discouraging.
Yes.
But you can be pretty sure that what's in your local garden center is appropriate to grow
in your area.
So, you know, these businesses have a vested interest in you succeeding, having a good experience
and coming back to buy more plants.
Right.
They're pretty risk averse in general.
We talk to Dan Stupielo at the Home Depot.
He's in charge of all live merchandise.
In our garden centers, we take more of a cautious approach, right?
We want to have tried and true varieties.
We want to make sure that, you know, what the products that we present, we feel good about
whether we label it an annual, apprenial, deciduous, and an evergreen material that we feel
really good that it's going to thrive in those locations in those stores.
Right.
So what this means is that whatever you find at like a big box retail, like Home Depot,
Lowe's, even Walmart, sales, sales plants, it's probably not going to die from cold weather.
It might die from neglect or planning it in the wrong place.
Oh no.
What are you saying?
I'm trying.
It's not likely that it's going to be a risky choice based on your hardness zone.
Okay.
So I'm going to be a little bit more safe with my Lowe's plants, right?
But you said you might be a little bit more, you know, living on the edge with your jasmine
plants.
So tell me more about like experimenting with plants.
Like, what will survive and what won't?
Right.
So if you've noticed your winters seem warmer in the last 10 years.
Maybe your neighbors are starting to grow things that you didn't think were possible and
you're feeling a little risky.
One idea is just to go down to your local Botanic Garden and talk to some experts there.
They're always trying new things and would have a real beat on what's going on in your
area.
Also, you're locally owned nursery, anything that's nearby that's locally owned.
Those people are really tuned into what's going on in the area in terms of the weather.
So I talked to nursery owner Tony Avent from Raleigh, North Carolina.
He's really into experimenting to see what plants can survive different situations so that
we can offer the widest possible variety of plants to the people that come to his nursery.
People as a general rule with plants are scared of failure.
They don't want to fail.
They don't want to kill their plants.
We live to kill plants.
We've killed as of this year over 50,000 different types of plants.
Everyone we kill, we learn something new and we record that in a database.
We've probably killed more plants than anybody alive today, but we've learned more about
what their tolerance is all.
So I think this is a pretty common thing for a lot of locally owned nurseries and Botanic
gardens.
These people are really trying to push the envelope.
Another interesting thing is that there's always new varieties of plants coming out.
There's not one kind of chamelea or one kind of azalea.
Plants are being bred all the time for new features.
Maybe it's for longer blooms, more blooms, maybe it's for cold hardiness, maybe it's
for being able to tolerate more heat.
When these new plants come on the market, people need to try them out to see how they do.
Your local Botanic Garden is going to know a lot more about that and your local nurseries.
You can go down there and ask those people and they'll probably talk for longer than you
want to listen.
Of course there's no guarantee that trying something a little bit risky, maybe a chamelea in
the New York suburbs, that's going to work.
But there are ways to mitigate damage from unseasonably cold winter nights.
As we talked about, you can bring potted plants inside, but you can also just wrap a blanket
on many plants.
If you're cold, they're cold, so wrap them up.
Daniel, you've peaked my interest.
Thank you so much for bringing the story to us.
You're welcome.
Thanks so much for it.
Okay, let's do a quick recap.
Takeaway 1, the USDA Hardiness Map is a tool to help home gardeners know what plants might
survive the winter in their area.
Takeaway 2, your Hardiness Zone could have recently moved.
That means your new lowest temperature in the winter could be a bit warmer, likely due
to climate change.
Takeaway 3, you can experiment with new plants you may not have been able to plant before.
Find your Hardiness Zone and see which plants might work.
See, you'll finally get to plant some jasmine like Daniel.
For more life kit, check out our other episodes.
We have one on how to plant an edible garden and another one on composting.
You can find those at npr.org slash life kit.
And if you love life kit and you want more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash
life kit newsletter.
This episode of life kit was produced by Sylvie Douglas.
Our visuals editor is Beck Harland and our digital editor is Malika Garib.
Megan Cain is our supervising editor and Beth Zonevin is our executive producer.
Our production team also includes Andy Taigel, Margaret Sereno, Claire Mauritianider, and
engineering support comes from Robert Rodriguez.
Special thanks to Jeff Brady, Connie Hanson, Jean, Nila Banerjee, and Alison Hurt.
I'm Regina Barber.
Thanks for listening.
Every weekday NPR's best political reporters come to you on the NPR Politics Podcast to
explain the big news coming out of Washington, the campaign trail, and beyond.
They don't just tell you what happened, they tell you why it matters.
Join the NPR Politics Podcast every afternoon to understand the world through political
eyes.
Never feel like you missed the big point of the last movie you watched.
At Pop Culture Happy Hour, a podcast by and four Pop Culture addicts, we'll talk about
the latest and greatest culture in depth.
For talking points for your next happy hour, check out Pop Culture Happy Hour, four days
a week, only from NPR.
Planet Money helps you understand the economy.
We introduce you to fascinating people.
We did not have a tragedy.
No man, didn't need one.
We show you how money influences everything.
Tell me what you like by telling me how you spend your money.
And we dig until we get answers.
I had a bad feeling you were going to bring that up.
Planet Money finds out.
All you have to do is listen.
