DATE: Tuesday, March 4, 1997                TAG: 9703040274

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY GUY FRIDDELL, LANDMARK SPECIAL WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   54 lines

PLANTS PROVE DURABLE IN CHANGING WEATHER

An edgy reader called to demand what the highly variable weather - spring one day, winter the next - was going to do to plants.

It had reached the point of wild swings within a single day, he said.

In mid-afternoon he wore a sweater as he and a Doberman had started for a walk. A half hour or so later as they returned, he'd have welcomed a coat. And gloves. And this after a Sunday that was more like June than March.

``You have come to the right guru, '' I told him.

``You know the answer?'' he asked, near shock.

``I know who does,'' I said - and called Lytton J. Musselman, botanist at Old Dominion University.

I listed plants abloom as in a Disney cartoon: bushes of camellias, blood-colored and shedding red gouts of flowers; fountain-like sprays of yellow forsythia . . .

Bradford pears, thick-set with white blossoms as if clotted with swirling snow; giant jonquils marching, golden heads held high, a spring brass band under command of the Music Man.

What's going to happen to them?

``Oh, nothing. They're used to that,'' Dr. Musselman said.

``In the first place, most you mentioned are not native plants - they're from Europe. They are adapted to the Mediterranean climate where there are wet, rainy winters. They are feeling right at home.''

What determines the behavior and distribution of plants are not the kind of variations we have been experiencing, but the extremes.

``If we had minus 4 degrees for two days or no rain for three months, that could affect them,'' he said.

The only thing in our environment that does not change year to year, he said, are the lengths of the days, and plants key to the light more than to temperatures.

Of course, the length of the days does change as the seasons progress, but the rate of change is the constant. And that is what the plants key on - not the cold or warm spells.

It's a great time of year,'' he said. ``From my window I see a sweet gum, a native tree. Its buds are swelling, keying to the day, measuring how much light there is and what season it is.

``The least variable component is the amount of insolution - not insulation - the light that comes from the sun.''

After the flood that beset Noah, he noted, there was a promise that the seasons would remain the same.

He turned to Genesis and read: `` `While the earth remainith, seed time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.'

``Isn't that great!''

I agreed and relayed the word to my reader.

``You're no guru,'' he said.

``It takes a guru to know a guru,'' I told him.

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