Or maybe the weather got funked up by the Doom of Valyria.

It’s fun to speculate about how a fictional world, one which the author likely just waved the hands and left it to the reader to think about, could work.

It makes sense to me that Westeros could make wine from a variety that dies back to the ground (however weird that would be here on Earth).  What stretches the imagination of my inner gardener however, is the notion of a plant whose roots remain viable for a ‘generation’. The definition of a ‘generation’ varies on google between 20-25 years.  A seed could last that long… but a root?  So, I’m going to go with the magic theory.

http://rfcarchives.org.au/Next/Fruits/Grapes/TropicalGrapes1-81.htm

Weirdly, though, there don’t seem to be any fruits or seeds which take more than one year to ripen (Arbutus unedo is one which has new flowers and ripe fruit on at about the same time, with a 1-year ripening time). So that does seem to suggest that, at least as far as life on earth is concerned, it would be very unlikely that a plant would be able to evolve a ripening cycle that was greater than 1 year (otherwise, it would have happened in the tropics, where just about any differentiation can confer an advantage to somebody).

In any case, the highly erratic nature of the seasons on this hypothetical world would make it difficult to imagine an evolutionary route which would result in complex plants at all (those with differentiated systems like flowers and seeds which take time to mature, and therefore require some consistency)

Unless these plants could predict the weather. Then that would work :)

Thanks, I’m turning in my 2 weeks notice. I need to re-evaluate my life and your world in it. Science is hard, so are rocks.  So my colleagues, stay strong, stay hard, go long, go deep, but not too deep.  It hurts the lymbic.