The magnolia in the piazza


The weather has been dreadful at home and dreadful here in Florence. At home we read that the snow continues to pile up. Here in Florence the days are gray and rain falls most days. Just before we arrived, rain fell, the temperatures plunged, everything was covered in a sheet of ice, and then an inch or two of snow fell. Very un-Italian.

But this may be more than just a coincidental stretch of bad weather in two places that are 4000 miles apart. According to a news article we read today there has been a (relative) heat wave at the North Pole. The Arctic sea ice is melting. Soon there may be a real Northwest Passage available, a sea lane from Europe beyond northern Canada to Asia.

Magnolia in 2016
This is a result of change in the world climate, a phenomenon that travels under names such as global warming or the more neutral term climate change. Some people say this way of thinking about we have observed is a hoax; some people, people who make judgements based on facts and probable theories, call this a real thing, some that has causes and, unfortunately, effects.

What are we to think?

Magnolia in 2016, a closer look

We have written in the past about a prominent piazza in Florence with a beautiful magnolia tree. We are not the only people who have admired this scene. Sometimes when we arrive in early March the buds on the tree are tight bound, ready but unwilling to burst. Sometimes after a warm spell that has occurred before we have arrived, the white and pink blossoms are spread out in glorious statement of the coming of spring. 

This year the swings in weather have been extreme. More extreme? How much more extreme? 

At home we’re pleased when the spring flowers find a way to survive a cold snap and please us their their presence when the snows melts away after a day or two. Nature must have experienced enough of these weather-related hardships to have evolved a certain kind of hardening among our favorite spring flowers.

But what about the extremes this year? Are they extremes that nature has seen before or are they extremes for which nature has been caught flat-footed?


Magnolia in 2018, blackened by weather that was too extreme

 This year our favorite magnolia in Piazza Beccaria will not produce blossoms. Will it produce leaves? We hope. Will it survive? We certainly hope.

Is the change in our climate beyond the bounds that nature has prepared this magnolia tree for? Yes, certainly. This observable fact is not a hoax.

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