There were floods in the Midwest last year.
Honest.
You wouldn’t know it, however, from the uproar over the absence of downpours this spring.
From Riverdale to Round Lake, lawn coddlers and petunia pamperers are in a tizzy over what isn’t falling on their heads, resorting to all manner of artificial quenching strategies in an effort to keep khaki from being the season’s predominant color.
Panicked homeowners are wresting sprinklers and hoses from drydock and mounting the first serious sprinkling campaign in the last two growing seasons. Some suburban water towers have been sucked almost dry, prompting a new wave of watering bans and even, in Fox River Grove, official police visits to halt illicit moistening.
“Oh no,” the rallying cry of this mode of thinking goes, “not another nice day.”
But as television meteorologists need to be reminded when they declare regional emergencies at the mere soupcon of a snowflake, it’s only weather.
It changes. It changes back. It does what you least want it to do at exactly the worst time. Right now, it just happens to be doing what it usually does in Arizona.
Bushes and lawns are going sepia, old-time photographs documenting the intermittent futility of nurturing nature.
Trees, especially newly planted ones, are struggling for their lives. And northern Illinois, along with southeast Wisconsin, is officially in the throes of a mild drought, as declared Wednesday by the National Weather Service.
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The bad news is that there is no immediate relief in sight. The drought is expected to be upgraded to moderate-a step below severe-sometime in the next 10 days since no significant rainfall is predicted and warm temperatures are expected to zap any existing moisture.
The month just concluded, in fact, was the second-driest May on record, with less than six-tenths of an inch of precipitation recorded at O’Hare International Airport, compared with the normal 3.32 inches. And this spring has been the third-driest, with just 3.87 inches of rain since March, compared with the normal 9.65 inches.
The good news, one could say, is that the homeowner’s parched earth is the apartment dweller’s succession of fine spring weekends.
The extended dry spell-which began roughly after the last “trace” of rain fell in the area on May 26-is nowhere near the magnitude of the one in 1988, and some even question dubbing it a drought.
Try telling that to gardeners, who aren’t about to sit idly by as their vines wither and their trees start shedding leaves three months before fall arrives.
“When I was planting my little tomato garden, it was like a dust storm,” lamented Naperville plant pathologist Gary Watson.
“Everything is dying,” moaned Fox River Grove gardener Sherri O’Keefe.
“It’s killing us!” yelped Itasca Country Club Superintendent Scott Speiden.
“The ground is so dry right now it’s crusty,” cried Chicago Park District landscape chief Geri Weinstein.
So sitting by they aren’t.
Dozens of cities and villages report record water usage. Fox River Grove nearly emptied its 1.2 million gallon tank last week, and Orland Park used a whopping 22 million gallons Saturday and Sunday, compared with the usual 9 million.
By far the most sweeping restrictions prompted by the run on water were in Algonquin, which is on “red alert” because one of its water tanks is being repaired. Among the prohibitions: no sprinklers, no lawn watering, no car washing and no swimming pool filling. Repeat violators face a $500 fine and an end to water service.
In Fox River Grove, police knocked on the door of Sherri O’Keefe and asked her to turn off her sprinkler and that of her neighbor.
A newly purchased 8-foot dogwood tree to commemorate her wedding anniversary sat on her front porch, waiting for the drought to end so it could be planted.
“Will my tree die?” she wondered. “Probably as my grass is. . . . That doesn’t sound good for our marriage.”
But what’s no good for the gardener can be great for the garden store. Several stores reported a run on watering implements, devices ranging in price from $3 to $79.99.
“We couldn’t give these things away last year,” said Rich Ellis, garden center manager of Sid’s Greenhouse & Garden Center Inc. in Palos Hills.
“It’s definitely a popular item,” added Mike Ross, a manager at Frank’s Nursery & Garden Center in Libertyville, where an entire row of sprinklers was cleaned out.
Homeowners’ irrigation woes are nothing compared with those faced by horticulturists.
At the 300-acre Botanic Garden in Glencoe, more than 1 million plants could be at risk without water. Using hoses with sprinklers and an overhead irrigation system, horticulturists have regularly been irrigating the display gardens.
At the Morton Arboretum in DuPage County, getting water to some of the outlying locations of the 1,500-acre preserve takes some ingenuity. Tanks are loaded onto trailers and pulled by a tractor.
“It’s not serious yet,” said Galen Gates, manager of horticulture collections at the Botanic Garden. “We’ll water the rest of the summer if need be.”
In Chicago, the lack of rain-coupled with the preponderance of windy, cloud-free days-has spelled trouble for thousands of newly planted trees.
The Forestry Bureau of the Streets and Sanitation Department is asking people to do for new trees in their area-the city planted 5,000 this spring-what nature won’t: water them.
“All it takes is a gallon or two every other day,” said Commissioner Eileen Carey. “And hopefully, we’ll have rain. Gee, I never thought I’d be saying that.”
The Chicago Park District is in a panic. Some 1,500 newly planted trees are in danger of deformity or death, Weinstein said. District gardeners have watered the new trees four times this season in an effort to keep them going.
“I don’t want another beautiful day,” she said. “I look at a cloud as a godsend because that’s something. And we need something.”
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Gloria Farquer decided that something was in her garage. Somewhere.
Detecting another dry day, the 44-year-old Libertyville homemaker-from under last summer’s plastic pots and last winter’s boots-pulled out the fancy, adjustable sprinkler and hose she bought a few years ago.
She aimed it straight at her browning lawn. It watered the house.
She changed the setting. It watered her. Then it watered the house again.
“I’ve got it rigged now,” Farquer said. “It doesn’t shoot at the house anymore.”