Plant science for plant people.

Siberian corydalis sets its bloom clock by snowmelt. The bumblebee queens that pollinate it set theirs by soil warmth. Same forest, two different calendars - and warming winters are pulling them apart.

When snow disappears unusually early, the flowers open weeks before the bees crawl out of hibernation. Unpollinated flowers mean fewer seeds. But here's the twist: populations from sites with reliably early snowmelt have evolved subtly different genetic timing for flowering, their internal clocks already nudged toward the new normal.

That capacity to evolve in step with a shifting climate shows up elsewhere this week. Researchers who grew seeds stored for decades alongside freshly collected ones found that wild plants are flowering earlier and handling drought differently than their great-grandparents did, changes written into DNA within a human lifetime. Meanwhile, beneath nearly every plant on Earth, fungal threads totaling 300 million tons are quietly delivering nutrients through networks dense enough to wrap around the galaxy.

The clocks are drifting, but the plants are already resetting them.