NEW MARKET, Va. -- Residential lawns that need mowing in Virginia well into December. Plum trees blooming in the heart of Boston around Christmas. Michigan lakes still free of ice in January. Topsoil not yet frozen in central Maine.

Our wintry world is standing on its head, weather-wise, and the lingering warmth has many gardeners concerned and confused. Should they be throwing protective covers over their blooming trees? Spreading another layer of mulch over their emerging flowers in anticipation of the blizzards yet to come? What's the typical grower to do?

"What can you do? It's out of your hands, really," said Scott Kunst, owner of Old House Gardens, an Ann Arbor, Mich., nursery specializing in heritage flower bulbs.

"We still have a lot of winter ahead. If it makes you feel any better, you can cover things with clay pots. But these bulbs have been coming up for millennia. This isn't the first spate of unusually warm weather they've seen."

Nature will sort things out and for the most part, leave blooming and fruiting plants little the worse for it, Kunst said. "The only time I've seen foliage or flowers damaged was one time in March when we got temps of about 5 degrees above for five days. They turned to mush. Even then, there was foliage under the ground that pushed its way up and the plants weren't seriously compromised.

"I've also seen flowers lying down on an early spring morning, seemingly damaged by frost, then by noon standing up, perfectly healthy. Most (bulbs) can take these things in stride."

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York City made headlines in early January when five of its ever-blooming cherry trees were profusely in flower. That species (Prunus Fudan-Zakura) is expected to begin flowering in late November, but not in such profusion. A few weeks of unusually balmy weather produced a spectacular run of thousands of blooms rather than the several hundred usually making an appearance.

"They're dramatic but sporadic," said Patrick Cullina, vice president, Horticulture and Facilities, at the botanic garden. "They're not displaying every possible blossom, though. The bulk of our cherry collection is still asleep. The big show is still on (for spring)."

Many trees and shrubs require a dormant period in order to bloom. A number of cherry, apricot and peach trees in the area along with forsythias, lilacs, rhododendrons and others have been tricked into thinking they already experienced a dormant period, Cullina said.

"All these plants are early indicators of spring. Those trees that have bloomed now won't bloom again in spring. But anything that hasn't bloomed yet will be blooming later. Their flower buds were formed the previous summer."

Such flowers lead usually to fruit, and while the early blooms likely won't have enough time to set fruit, that isn't such a problem with ornamentals, Cullina said.

"That's largely aesthetic. It is (a problem) for commercial orchards, though. It's a big deal if you're trying to grow peaches for next year."

Ground that would be rock-hard this time of year in many sections of the country remains workable for cultivation. Take around Maine, for instance.

Lois Berg Stack, a University of Maine cooperative extension specialist in ornamental horticulture, went into her Orono backyard with a spade one day the first week of January, looking for the depth of the frost line.

"I found frost only in the raised bed," she said. "There's apparently enough geothermal heat that flat ground has not yet developed a frost layer, even at an 8-inch depth. In the raised bed, where the soil is elevated and exposed to temperatures that are colder, there was a bit of frost about 1-inch deep, but I could easily dig through it."

So while it's conceivable a person still can drop some spring-blooming bulbs into the ground, it isn't advisable.

"Bulbs such as tulips and daffodils are optimally planted in late fall, when they produce good root growth but no top growth," Stack said. "Bulb root development requires several weeks of cool soil temperatures. We've had extra weeks of good rooting conditions this year, but that could end with a blizzard next week. Planting now is risky."

She added that a bulb "planted too late to develop roots will still send up a flower stalk in spring, and that stalk will need water and nutrients as it develops. A spring-emerging bulb without roots will die, primarily because there are no roots to provide water to supply the growth."

Well-tended lawns, meanwhile, are resilient and should perform normally through the next growing season, she said.

"In the past few years, people have moved toward one fertilizer application per year, for maintenance and environmental reasons. A widely recommended target date for a one-time application is late fall, generally during that window of time between the last mowing and the ground freezing. The rationale is that fertilizer is taken up by the grass plants in late fall while their roots are still active, and stored in the root systems, providing for a quick green-up in spring without an exuberant flush of early season growth.

"This year might present a different scenario," she said. "I suspect that some of those nutrients have already been used during the green growth of the past several weeks and that fertility levels in spring will be low."

Stack, however, isn't recommending that die-hard gardeners take their planting paraphernalia out of the potting sheds anytime soon, despite the current warm temperatures.

"There's lots of winter ahead of us," she said, "and I am hoping for many snowfalls. I have not put away my snowshoes and I expect to use them many times in the next few months. I can wait to plant peas."

You can contact Dean Fosdick at deanfosdick(at)netscape.net.