You may be surprised to find out where your garden, farm and forest end up on the new U.S.D.A. Plant Hardiness Zone Map.

The Hardiness Map purports to tell you what plants will safely grow in your zone without freeze damage. The new map seems ultra-precise. I can even see that half my farm falls in one climate zone, and half in another.

And for a few seconds of perusing that map this morning, I was flabbergasted to discover that it’s as if most of Alabama is a hundred miles or more warmer than it was on the last zone map, published a decade ago. Mobile is where Gainesville, Fla., was. Montgomery and Birmingham are now in the zone where Mobile was. And even Alabama’s arctic north around Huntsville is in a zone once reserved only for coastal Alabama.