Home » Posts tagged 'Cold Hardiness'
Tag Archives: Cold Hardiness
Starting from Ground Zero…
From a warm If relentlessly damp November – the last of the sweetcorn, nerines, and yellow cherry tomatoes – early December plunged the Atlantic North West into a coating of black ice.
When its grip loosened, after over a week, two metre tree peonies & flowering pheasantberry were reduced to brown rags. Many long-lived herbaceous perennials look unlikely to recover.
Local nurseries who grow on their own stock were hard-hit, and one local vegetable producer who lost Winter root stores has decided to quit in consequence.
A post on climate instability and its effects on garden ecosystems is overdue.)
From this starting-point is not possible to make a long-term plan or calendar for the season. Frogswell’s visiting days and plant sales for 2023 will be on ad hoc basis, and flagged via Twitter. @frogswell_ie
Spring – when it arrives – is too rapid and brief for frequent blogging!
Growth buds burst through the litter of dead leaves and seedpods on a hybrid tree peony – Paeonia delavayii x lutea.
Coping with the Cold
The scene in the orchard on Brigit’s day… Feb 1st. Flowering was at its peak at the end of January, but the predicted cold weather put paid to plans for an early viewing day.
The dramatic collapse of the flowering plants is not terminal; despite their Mediterranean origins hybrid hellebores are actually very hardy. (Down to USDA Hardiness Zone 4, so plants may just be accommodating the current polar vortex).
Their ancestral species are typically found at high altitudes, exposed to late snowfall, and the defence mechanism evolved there has been inherited by the garden hybrids.
As the ambient temperature climbs above freezing, the stems gradually uncurl. Or in a long cold spell, the plants just stay hunkered down.
The longer-stemmed green-flowered hellebore species which come from less extreme climates, lack this adaptation. Frogswell’s thriving stock of the apple-green helleborus sternii, for example, was completely knocked out by the long freeze of 2010-2011.
Frogswell 