U.S. agriculture officials confirmed last week what plants have been telling us for years: Winters aren’t as cold as they used to be. The temperature difference over the past two decades has caused a marked shift in this state’s winter-hardiness planting zones, the weather bands on a map that indicate where plants will grow.
According to a new zone map from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the zones have shifted by several counties in parts of the state, including a total reclassification of Johnston County from Zone 7 to Zone 8.
The difference is most noticeable along North Carolina’s southeastern rim, where the dividing line between those two zones has migrated more than a 100 miles, from the Atlantic coast as far inland as Charlotte.
If the trend continues, sometime in this century Raleigh will be reclassified into the same climate zone that today includes Dallas and Montgomery, Ala. Raleigh, technically in Subzone 7B, is now less than 1 degree away from being in Zone 8.
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