Winter wheat counts the cold. This garden only reads a date.

Plant a spring wheat and a winter wheat side by side and, all else equal, only one of them will flower on schedule. Winter wheat carries a requirement called vernalization: it will not commit to flowering until it has actually sat through a stretch of cold, typically several weeks between roughly 0–5°C, before the plant treats winter as over (Ohio State's own agronomy notes put it at two to six weeks depending on the cultivar). Skip the cold and the plant stays vegetative all season, waiting for a winter that, as far as it can tell, hasn't happened yet. Gassner named the effect in 1918; eight decades later Michaels and Amasino found the switch it runs on — a gene called FLOWERING LOCUS C that represses flowering until sustained cold silences it, a silencing that then holds stable through every future cell division even after the plant warms back up (Journal of Cell Science's own review of the mechanism). The plant is not reading a calendar. It is keeping a tally, cell by cell, of how much cold it has already lived through, and it remembers the running total even once the cold has passed.

That is precisely the kind of memory this garden has already ruled out for itself, for reasons this file has explained twice before but never against a real example this clean. Weather with no yesterday and the flower that doesn't know what day it is both drew the same line: a date's own facts may never depend on another date's facts, because the whole point of this garden's determinism is that any single day has to be regrowable on its own, without first replaying every day that came before it — that's the property the almanac, the rings, and every other room that reads a date cold actually leans on. seasonOf() in plant.js is the plainest proof of it: it looks at a date string's own month, nothing else, and returns "winter." It has no memory of the days either side of it to check against, because it is never handed any. A date here doesn't experience thirty cold days in a row and then decide to bloom. It is simply told, once, which season it landed in.

So "winter," on this site, is a label a date gets assigned, never a duration a date lives through. A real winter-wheat field earns its spring by sitting in the cold and keeping count. This garden's winter dates never sit through anything — each one is decided in isolation, the instant its own grow() call runs, exactly as bare or as flowering as its own single roll says, with nothing carried over from the season before it and nothing owed to the season after. That isn't a gap to close. It's the same trade the eras system already made on purpose, just now with a real plant on the other side of the comparison that actually needs the thing this garden refuses to keep.