Flowers Canada proudly serves the cities in Canada, Ottawa, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and all other cities and surrounding suburbs. We can deliver your order the same day, as long as you order the flowers and gifts before 1pm receiver time. We choose only the freshest, top quality flowers.
Zone 2 is the worlds largest hardiness zone and extends in a banc across the Northern Hemisphere, just south of the Artic Circle. It covers a vast area of sparsely populated, predominantly cool, coniferous woodland which is replaced by swamp and then tundra further north. In North America this woodland area is ecologically described as boreal forest while in northern Europe and across Asiatic Russia this area is known as taiga.
The zone has a cold but not arctic climate, with an average minimum winter temperature of -50 to -40 F in a wet year and 20 in (50cm) in a dry year. The ground is snow covered for eight months of the year and evaporation is slow, creating a cool moist climate. As the land nears the Arctic Ocean, precipitation diminishes, the summers become shorter, cooler, drier and the winters longer and colder.
The southernmost section of this zone is largely timbered, but as the forest progresses northward the trees gradually reduce in size and thin out. The ground progressively becomes more waterlogged and the tree cover declines and is replaced by an almost continuous band of swamp, known as, muskeg, in North America. This ground supports only limited tree growth. Moving further northward, approaching the Arctic ocean, the ground becomes drier and the subsoil becomes permanently frozen, forming a layer of permafrost that can be several feet deep. Here the muskeg is in its turn replaced by stone barren ground and treeless tundra.
North of this lies Zone 1, which has a uniform cold dry climate. Winters are colder than in Zone 2 and annual precipitation is often as low as 5-10in (12-25 cm)a year and summer temperatures rarely exceed 50 degrees F (10 degrees C). Plants found in Zone 1 are sparsely distributed, xerophytic in habit (adapted to low levels of water), low growing, and are mainly found on sheltered slpoes or in depressions where snow accumulates in winter.
Effects of climate on plant life
The boreal forest and taiga are mainly coniferous, however, they do support some deciduous trees. Evergreens dominate because they do not renew their foliage annually and are more efficient in utilizing scarce nutrients and minerals on infertile soils. Due to its northern location diversity within the forest is restricted to less than a dozen tree species. In the Canadian boreal forest coniferous trees include tamarack (Larix laricina), white spruce (Picea glauca), black spruce (Picea mariana), and jack pine (Pinus banksiana), trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides), and balsam popular (P. balsamifera) also occur. A similar group of related tree species inhabit Alaska and the taiga of Northern Europe and Siberia.
Many of these tree species are widely distributed and can be grown much further south. This also applies to some of the boreal forest shrubs and herbaceous perennial plants that are found in the zone. Most successful are those that grow in porfusion following a forest fire: choke cherry (Prunus virginiana), pin cherry (P. pensylvancia), red osier dogwood (Cornus sericea), and herbaceous perennials like fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium), though fireweed can become a major thug in the garden. More desirable, delicate shade plants like twin flower (Linnaea borealis) are challenging to horticulturists further south due to the difficulty of re-creating their cool mossy habitat. Twin flower, like most Zone 2 plants, is best grown from seed that requires a 6 to 8 week cold period at 40 degrees F (4 degrees C) to ensure germination.
As the forest nears the tree line, generally defines by the 50 degrees F (10 degrees C) isotherm in mid July, the trees thin and open lichen –rich woodland dominates dry sites. These are interspersed by vast areas of muskeg bog and fen (marsh). These porrly drained, peaty wetlands often support continuous sheets of sphagnum moss, with scattered black spruce and a heath layer that includes Labrador tea (Ledum groenlandicum) and bog blueberry (Vaccinium uliginosum). On less acid fens, tamarack replaces the black spruce and the shrub layer is mainly willow (Salix species), speckled alder (Alnu rugosa), and bog myrtle (Myrica gale) with an herbaceous ground cover of mainly sedges (Carex species). Even in impoverished wetlands such as these, plants will adapt and this area supports several species of insectivorous plants, including northern pitcher plant (sarracenia purpureai), butterwort (Pinguicula vulgaris), and round-leafed sundew (Drosera rotundifolia). These and other plant species from muskeg bogs can be grown in semi-shade as far south as Zone 7 in 18 in (45 cm) deep beds lined with a rubber pond liner, filled with a mixture of 50 percent sphagnum peat and 50 percent sand.
Closer to the Arctic Ocean, even when the surface of the permafrost thaws, this thawing often reaches only a few inches deep by mid-August, and the remaining permafrost layer prevents the rainfall and melting snow from draining. However, if it were not for this trapped moisture, flowering plants would be rare in the near desert-like conditions of the Arctic. As a result of low temperatures and few nutrients, stony barrens tundra, plants are swarf in size and starved, and frequently drought-tolerant in habit. Vegetation in the far north of the zone is confined to few tough plants such as alpine bearberry (Arctostaphylos alpine), mountain cranberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea). Lapland rosebay (Rhododendron lapponicum), and Dryas integrifolia.
On moist tundra the vegetation often forms a continuous low mat of sedges such as cotton grass (Eriophorum angustifolium), grasses, and dwarf shrub willow, with unusual plants like Cassiope tetragona, and the pink flowered tufted moss campion (Silene acaulis). Some of these tundra plants, can be grown in a traditional rock-garden alpine scree, as long as these are constructed with an infertile fast-draining gravel soil. Most of the more unusual tundra plants are notoriously difficult to grow successfully further south where high soil temperatures are usually fatal. Perhaps the only way to succeed with these plants is grow them in an alpine house in a refrigerated planting bed.