Warmer growing zone sounds nice except for the snake factor

A gardener from the other side of Lake Michigan recently tweeted, “Some people say they were born at the wrong time. Me, I was born in the wrong hardiness zone.”

I’ve never related so much to something I’ve seen on Twitter. And who among us zone 5 gardeners hasn’t pined to grow plants we know are destined for failure in our frozen winter gardens?

Ever since I learned what a hardiness zone is — a standard set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture based on average low temperates that gardeners can use to determine which plants are likely to thrive in their area — I’ve thought about what zone I wish I were growing in. It’s a dilemma. Some plants require a certain length of dormancy brought on by cooling temperatures to produce fruit or flowers and therefore don’t do well in areas where it’s too warm. Other plants are just too tender to survive extreme winter temperatures and won’t survive where it’s too cold in winter.

After a great deal of pondering and soul-searching, I decided that if I could transplant my garden to any zone, it would be 7. Zone 7 is the very definition of temperate, reaching an average low temperature of just zero, as compared to the frigid -20 of our zone 5. (There’s a long explanation about how the USDA delineates these zones, but I’m going with averages for the sake of not having readers fall asleep mid-column).

It turns out that zone 7 is pretty popular, based on my gardening brethren who chimed in on Twitter. Apparently it hits the sweet spot for a lot of gardeners. One person, the author of several best-selling books on vegetable growing in cold climates, was practically salivating over the thought of the variety of fruits and vegetables she could grow in that zone.

At first glance, zone 8 sounds OK too, but once you get that warm you have to pre-chill spring-blooming bulbs like tulips and daffodils and it becomes difficult to grow some fruit trees like apples.

Of course, much depends on other weather related factors. The climate of the Pacific Northwest, much of which falls in zone 8, is much different from the climate you’ll find in the Carolinas, which are also largely zone 8.

And then a few gardeners in the conversation pushed even farther to subtropical zone 9, but strictly on the basis of being able to grow one plant — the beautiful tree fern (aka Dicksonia antarctica), a native of Australia that looks a bit like a short palm tree with ferns growing out the top.

Of course gardeners have to contend with a lot of other issues in the garden beyond just their growing zone, including humidity, heat and wildlife.

And it’s that last category that ultimately had several gardeners rethinking their dream growing zone picks.

The culprit? Snakes. Here in southeastern Wisconsin we won’t be growing tree ferns, but snakes, and certainly harmful snakes, are few and far between, whereas you might find yourself eye-to-eye with a snake snuggled up in your tree fern in zone 9.

Like I said, zone 5 sounds just about right.