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The flesh-eating plants in the cult film “The Day of the Triffids” reminded me of gigantic lilies. I hadn’t seen the movie for decades — and had forgotten all about the monsters — until last summer, when I walked into my wildly overgrown backyard after just three weeks away on vacation.
The tomato plants had reached the Triffid-like height of five feet. A rapacious climber that had crept in from a neighbor’s yard was busy covering the kitchen window and racing up the rear wall of the house.
Egged on by freakish bursts of rain and heat, the rampaging plant life seemed more appropriate to a jungle in South America than to a Brooklyn garden.
I didn’t know what to expect when I surveyed the garden for spring planting this year. Then I noticed that the herb planters were bristling with green, as though the winter had never happened at all.
Stay tuned for more of the same. As the National Wildlife Federation noted in a report last year, gardeners are experiencing global warming in ways that nongardeners are unlikely to notice. People who pay attention can see that warmer-weather plants are moving northward, along with invasive species eager to usurp new zones.
The heat has already changed what I plant. Some varieties of impatiens are out; they melt like ice cream, even in the shade. The big questions of the moment have to do with the northern trees. Will they adapt to the heat? Or will disturbances in the dormancy cycle cause them to die?
The warming has changed my attitude toward shade gardening and the two 60-foot locusts that loom over my yard. In previous years, I was happy to hack away during their periodic prunings. As a philistine on these matters, I rejoiced when the eastern locust lost a mammoth branch, letting in more light than the yard had probably seen in decades. Recently, I’ve begun to imagine how hot the yard would become if we were to be left treeless and at the mercy of an increasingly merciless sun. The answer is very hot indeed.

nytimes.com