Circadian Spring
Spring – few other professionals are as coalesced with the season of spring than landscapers. We literally manage the entirety of spring. Flowers, trees budding with leaf break, irrigating, lawns greening up and needing to be mowed weekly are the iconic signals to even the lay person that spring has arrived. It can be perceived by sight, sound, and smell.
However, for those who wake before sunrise, and work till sunset, our senses are attuned to a more planetary change that drives all those other biological indicators that our hemisphere is launching into its period of growth. Daylight length is now equal and dramatically getting longer.
Most people don’t realize that the seasonal changes between day and night lengths are NOT linear. The change is parabolic like our earth. At the equinoxes of spring and fall, those light vs. dark changes are happening at their highest rate, over two minutes per day added now or lost at fall. In contrast at the solstices, daytime length is only changing by around 20 seconds. So, we are now gaining two minutes a day, 14 minutes a week, and over an hour a month of more daylight per day at this time of year! This means that we will have 14 hours and 27 minutes of daylight come June 19, along with a longer lingering twilight at summer solstice.
Add to all this the steroid-like jump brought by Daylight savings and it’s hard not to imagine that our souls must be thinking: It’s GO Time! For all of us in the Green Industry it certainly is or soon will be. With all the isolation, our Circadian cycle is loaded like a Spring, which is also defined as a device that can launch into action with reserved kinetic energy. It is a time of rebirth and resurrection; it’s hard to think that our emergence from COVID at this time of year isn’t also part of something larger.
In the coming work craziness, we may not be as self-aware of the rapid changing times, but deep down we feel it more so than those who don’t work outside, who don’t daily see the emergence of daylight and smell the blossoms. So, may the energy of spring and all that it entails, be a longer lasting light leading us all, to our warmer days ahead. It will be a very special Springtime this year!
Pete Dufau, CLT, CWM is Past President of the Channel Islands Chapter of CLCA, Chairman Birch Financial, Chairman Landscape Water Conservation Foundation, and President Ventura County Lincoln Club.