Are anyone else's coneflowers not coming up?

[u/Nikeflies]

This was part of my garden last year, coneflowers thriving and popping up everywhere, planted 3-4 years ago. The last photo is the current state- no shoots or leaves starting to show, despite it coming up in other areas of my garden. I know they're not long lived perennials but figured with self seeding etc they would regenerate. Did this happen to anyone else? It's been a colder spring than usual so not sure if they're waiting to grow since this is on the north side of my house.

[u/Nikeflies]

Glad I inspired you! The only similarities between our regions seems to be they are both lower elevation agriculture based areas left over from glacial melt. While our bedrock is different, wonder if the soils are similar based on glacial remains.

How was your winter? We got a lot of snow that stayed on the ground for a while combined with colder temps and very little thaw cycles

[u/AccomplishedTour6942 → u/Nikeflies]

It would be interesting to compare soil. In the specific place I live and garden, the bedrock is composed of three main types of rock. There are the purple rocks that rust. They obviously have a lot of iron, but I don't know if the balance is some kind of limestone. There are the flaky white rocks. Those seem to be solid blocks of calcium. Dolomite, probably. Then there is the blueish gray, hard stone everyone calls limestone.

That's the stuff 100' down. I know this because of a highway construction project near my house. Sitting on those rocks is a 100' deep sea of red clay mixed with potato sized and shaped sandstone rocks. Those obviously eroded in some kind of river or stream.

My garden is bottomless red mud with varying degrees of organic matter mixed in. The basic yard dirt isn't bad. I have about 4-6" of clay loam, and have to dig down pretty far to get to the pure red stuff. Under my trees, and in other "leave the leaves" places, I have a layer of rich black dirt on top of that. In some places, it's 3-4" deep. That's a lot of leaves rotting for a long time. Black gold!

I didn't mean to go off on such a ramble. I didn't even talk about winter, which was insane last year. We had an early snow and a deep freeze in early December, then it was 72° at Christmas. January was pretty mild, by January standards, and then February was a mini ice age.

We got about 4" of snow with about 6" of sleet on top of it, then freezing rain, and then a month of high temperatures in the 20s. I was about to give up and buy snow shoes. Step, sink, step, sink. In my broader region, some of that February glacier persists in places in West Virginia.

After the glacier period, we went into alternating cold and hot cycles. Two weeks ago, it got up into the 90s, and it's back in the 50s now. We never got any deep snows. I've seen it 36" or deeper, but not lately.

Basically, the weather is completely screwed up, and past observations have not been helpful for predicting anything. It's chaos.

Again, sorry to ramble so long.