In many ways of course, we are blessed. We have a long growing season, and when friends in Denver are brushing the snow off the greenhouse door, we are well into the joys of spring’s bounty. When our cousins in North Dakota have stocked and shut the root cellar for the season, we are still doing magical things with tomatoes. For your average gardener, the season lasts from April to October, and for triple A personalities with greenhouses and creativity, it can last longer than that.

Our blessings continue with average annual precipitation levels hovering around the 40-inch mark, and decent soil composition making up much of the region – a region which technically runs from as far north as New York state to just south of Norfolk, VA.

Yes, on the face of it, life should be made in the shade for a Mid-Atlantic gardener with a pocketful of seeds, a trowel, and a dream. But of course, that’s not the whole, deceptive, story.

I admit I fell for the bait and switch. As a West Coast transplant with much time spent in the UK, I was lured in by summer thunderstorms, Kew Garden-esque springs, green hedgerows, firefly summers, stone houses, and of course, a burgeoning wine industry.

From the outset, it looked like we had settled into the best of both my worlds. We could enjoy a sunny summer’s day, experience a brief summer downpour, then finish enjoying the rest of the day knowing our rain barrels were filled and our BBQ wasn’t ruined.

We could revel in the glory of deciduous spring in a way that those from our childhood homes in the Sierra Nevada mountains could not – experiencing full winter devastation to glorious spring awakening in two weeks flat.

And it was that last bit – as a gardener – that would fool me. The winter would erase any memory of the previous season’s punishing heat, flying insects and dreaded humidity; and the frosted hedgerows and fields would make it clear that, wherever I was, it wasn’t California. I started each season feeling I was back in a sweetly unfolding English spring.

Nope.

It took me a long time to realize that the USDA Zone map only concerned itself with just how bad winter was going to get in a neighborhood near me; NOT how winter hardy plants were going to survive Dante’s Inferno in what passed for August in the Mid-Atlantic.

Year after year, I would begin the season with Delphinium and end it bitterly with crispy pots of lobelia, always certain that this particular season had been unusual…that this particular season had suffered from some sort of neglect on my part…that this particular season would be greatly improved next year.

A turning point for me came several years ago, when I became friends with the [now late] garden author Pamela Harper – a British ex-pat gardener who lived and gardened on the coastal plains of Virginia for more than fifty years. One of her books, Time-Tested Plants (Timber Press, 2000), was a revelation to me, and helped me to start gardening for the climate I was experiencing, not the one that was being promised in the first two weeks of May.

Harper’s vision matched my own. She wanted to grow the same plants I wanted to grow – but either had to substitute other, better suited species, or adapt via different cultivars. And she had fifty years of experience doing just that.

When it came to old English favorites like delphiniums, she contented herself with spire-like perennials such as Erythrina herbacea (Coral Bean) or enjoyed annual larkspur. Instead of watching traditional campanulas falter under intense heat, she grew C. garganica instead and enjoyed a carpet of bloom in May and June.

Through her numerous examples, I slowly came to garden for a Mid-Atlantic climate. Which, while not without intense challenges and fluctuating seasons, is exceptionally satisfying when you’re trying to grow your skills as a gardener.

Certainly I could do without the gnats, and if global weather patterns suddenly erased the humidity, I would not shed a single tear; but I have come to appreciate the wealth of water…the sunny skies…the hot summers that make roadside mullein come to life. I adore the many shades of green, and conversely enjoy the many shades of brown come winter. And autumn? Well autumn is a book unto itself around here, and is quite rightly envied in other parts of the world.

When you move, it takes time to establish what your new normal is. 23 years later, I think that the most interesting thing about the Mid-Atlantic is, there isn’t one. That’s the challenge. That’s the fun.