Winter Protection

Last year as the weather worsened and the ice and snow storm began in earnest I adopted a rather cavalier attitude toward protecting the more tender plants in my garden; a kind of "survival-of-the-fittest-devil-may-care" mentality. I imagined that I was a participant in The Great Experiment - doing my part to determine the lowest threshold of hardiness of some of the more experimental plants in my garden.

Well as it happened, I lost many of my most treasured plants. Not that I mourned too loudly for them, I did my best to look at it as an opportunity to add new, even more lovely plants to my collection.

This year, as temperatures drop and the forecast calls for continued low temps and snow, I have decided to protect some of my borderline plants. I am taking a more conservative approach; please don't think me weak and unwilling to be adventuresome! As a rule, unless it is something really special and/or in a container that can be (easily) moved under cover, the limit of protection I offer is a layer of frost cloth wrapped around the plant.

Plants that I have wrapped in the garden:
Phormium (New Zealand flax)
Coryline australis
Melianthus major (honeybush)
Prostanthera rotundifolia (Australian mint bush)

Some of the plants that I cared enough about (or paid too much for!) that I moved to a covered location in the garage:
Dicksonia antarctica (Australian tree fern), tender succulents in containers, and miscellaneous treasures from the HPSO fall plant sale that did not get planted last fall and, being in their growers pots, are consequently more vulnerable to weather extremes.