Flowers

Operation shock and thaw

23.01.10

The snow and frost have played havoc with your plants, but don’t give up hope completely, writes JANE POWERS  

A WEEK MAY be a long time in politics, but its also enough time to wreak several disasters on a garden. At the time of writing, Im still in awe at the damage the snow and ice inflicted on our plants over a few days at the beginning of this month.

Our lowest temperature was -4.3 degrees, which was balmy in comparison to the arctic reaches of Carlow, where -12.1 was recorded at Oak Park in the early hours of the same date (January 8th).

Nonetheless, my own freeze was the worst I have seen in this part of Dublin since I started collecting temperatures about 15 years ago. As I look at the dark rags that were once leaves on some of my tender evergreen specimens, I’m thinking: you were lovely while you lasted, but now it’s so long Solanum, toodle-oo Tetrapanax and adios Echium.

But maybe not: some frost-slaughtered plants have a habit of resurrecting themselves in springtime, and putting out new shoots from lower down the stem, or even from beneath the soil. The fact that the weather was quite cold before this month’s assault meant that evergreen plants had already partially shut down, and were barely ticking over. If a warm spell had preceded the freeze, leaves and stems would have been lush and full of sap, and far more vulnerable. So, there is a faint hope of a spring resuscitation. In the meantime, I’ll leave most of the dead foliage in place, as a buffer against further frosts in the coming months.

Source: Irish Times