The freeze damage was significant, haphazard and hopefully largely cosmetic. There is a lot of leaf burn. Only time will tell how far down the stem the damage has gone. It seems the shrubberies and Japanese maples took the brunt of it. At work today many of the clients bushes were in sad shape. All the fresh new growth was toast.
Back home the Yellie Mum was one of the few perennials I saw with immediate signs of freeze burn. Next door in the ridge top garden the hosta and astilbe suffered major damage.
The buckets did not work for the wee baby Japanese maples. They froze. I was even more upset to see that some of the new unfurled shoots of my bamboo screening along the scenic byway had keeled over. This was the year the bamboo was aiming to double in height. Who knows what I will get out of them now. They send up new growth once a year. That's all you get.
Garden plants are not the only things that suffer in these events. The frozen leaves of Tulip Poplars were already very evident on the trees as I drove back home. If the forest begins to turn brown in the next week from the subdued colors of spring, it will be a very bad sign for all the life forms that depend upon the forest for their survival.
I don't think the freeze hurt the dead hemlocks in the foreground. They have been dead for some time.
Events like this that make plants unreliable, make stone in the garden all that much more important. Even the Mayapple looked a little piqued this morning. They seem to have recovered.
It is 41.9 degrees at 10:26 pm. The suggested low for tonight is 27 degrees give or take. Freeze, burn, thaw, repeat. The wind is calm. Perfect conditions for an inversion when all the cold air sinks to the bottom. I don't think it is going to freeze up here tonight. The people down below are going to get burned again though. Better them than me.
Posts
4 comments:
We hit 29 degrees. I saw one small tree that was burned pretty bad. I chose not to look closely today. The Peonies and Iris seemed just fine. I
will be brave tomorrow and take a good look. We are only supposed to get to 32 tonight. Hopefully, we will not go that low. Let's hope everything, including your little Japanese maples pop back. I know that is heart breaking.
The first anonymous was me. We only got down to 35 this morning, so hopefully we are through this. Hope you stayed in the 30's.
Dianne
That is heart breaking. I sure hope all that was damaged will come back better that ever.
Still gets cool here at night. Days are nice for working in the shade.
Ouch. Our predicted low of 26 must have not happened, because I used buckets and sheets and pots and coolers and made our yard look ridiculous, and you can't tell a difference between the plants I covered and those I didn't 2 days later. The only damage I could see was to the daisies that spread like wildfire, so I'm not sorry about that. The crabapples and may apples and trilliums and jack in the pulpit made it just fine, so I went from tears of worry to tears of joy. I'm sorry about your plants, I hope they recover. It is really heartbreaking to nurse them along and be done in by random weather patterns, especially when you pour so much heart and soul into yours...
Post a Comment