I find myself making excuses for the plants. Such as: on the north side of brownstone blocks in Brooklyn, the hulking rose bushes found in many front yards sit not far from stuccoed facades that bask in the low winter sun all day long. It’s the heat the buildings absorb, slowly emanating throughout the chilly nights, that keeps the roses from freezing—that has allowed them to keep blooming past Christmas, past New Years.
Or there are the two little cherry trees on the next block over from me, which broke into bloom sometime in December. They're just young, trunks no bigger than your wrist, and more easily awoken from dormancy. There are yellow irises, calendula, strawflowers, hellebore, and the snowdrops that bloomed before any snow fell—all, surely, just tricked into flower due to some combination of a concrete-heavy microclimate and a historically warm winter.
But what I could not find an excuse for was this: a mature cherry tree in the midst of Green-Wood Cemetery fully in bloom in the early weeks of the new year.
The tree made me think of another winter cherry. On New Year's Day in 1971, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark planted a cherry tree in the basement of 112 Greene St. in SoHo. Dressed up with a mound of grass and ringed with grow lights, the tree bloomed—despite it being wintertime, despite it being in the basement of a 1970s-era SoHo building (which I imagine was not all that conducive to non-fungal life). “When it was in its full glory, they had an opening,” Jessamyn Fiore, the co-director of Matta-Clark’s estate, recounted in an interview with The Paris Review, “and a woman came down and saw it, and ended up taking off all her clothes and lying on the mound of grass under the lights.”
It seems like there should be something similarly ecstatic about the drama of spring breaking into midwinter out of doors too, of a temperate climate experiencing a nearly endless bloom. With actual winter weather in the forecast the other week, which would finally break the more than 700-day run of snowlessness in the city, I went to the cemetery to see up close the tree I had first noticed while driving past. But winding through the hilly acres of Green-Wood, some portion of One World Trade always looming on the horizon, it was as unnerving as it was exciting to see a haze of cherry-blossom pink cover a number of different trees.
Even a “warm” winter day can feel cold and damp (give me the bracing but dry high 20s over the humid low 40s any day), and while a cherry tree in flower should give the impression of early April, of having made it through, it reads different in January. While a tree may rely on a complex series of cues involving the length of the day and the temperature to determine if its dormancy time or not, being able to know intellectually not only what time of year it is but how cold it should be turns the whole experience toward the uncanny.
But not everyone stops to marvel and worry over the errant tree in flower, still-blooming roses. It can seem some days like we’ve already forgotten what winter should be and has been until very recently. Sure, people talk about the lack of snow, but that’s the most obvious thing that’s changed over the last two years (which have been historic El Niño years, it’s important to remember, which has compounded the shifts caused by climate change). Meanwhile, a sweet gum tree still in full green leaf in January is just a tree to most people who walk past it, not a harbinger. It’s warm enough outside, after all.
The cherry tree I came looking for was easy enough to find: large and unkept, with a wide crown that hangs over a number of surrounding graves, it was still lit up with pink. One headstone that sat just outside its boughs rather delightfully bore the name CHERRY. The tree did seem less electric than it had a week or so prior, when just a flash of it in my peripheral vision was enough to make me rubberneck while driving along the southern edge of the cemetery. Looking at the flowers up close, I realized why: they were actually starting to fade. The tree had gone through an entire bloom in the midst of winter.
It snowed, finally, a few days later, and in the nights that followed the temperature dropped into the 20s. The few plants on my front patio that were still hanging on finally got hit with a killing frost. It seemed that winter, even if it only showed up briefly, had finally wiped the slate clean. The cherry blossoms are surely gone now, and the leaves on that one sweet gum have turned grey with the cold, though they’re still hanging limply onto the branches. I saw some flowers that looked as if they had been freeze-dried, the blooms crumpled but still colorful and whole. I figured there would be no more signs of spring until spring, and that felt right.
But then just the other day I saw them: roses. They’re still alive, if not a bit worse for the wear, and still in bloom.