Re: CULT: freeze damage
- Subject: Re: CULT: freeze damage
- From: L* M*
- Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2002 20:48:41 -0400
I'm not sure which is worse: Rot Queen or Freezer Queen <g>. I hope the
guys in the mountains west aren't freezer kings like they were last
year. I think Lowell was ready to holler 'Uncle' last year & Jeff often
has late freeze damage.
I agree, Judy, the tendency to break dormancy and start rapid growth
seems to be mostly genetic. I suspect that there may be a slight factor
related to stored goodies in some of those super fat west coast rhizomes
that makes them be a bit more 'juicy' & susceptible, but haven't done
any experiments to test that theory. I've found that I can be pretty
successful in picking cultivars that will escape/survive the late
freezes by tracking pedigrees & trying to stay with the MLs & Ls, but
I'm not 100% successful and I don't try a lot that have 'questionable'
pedigrees and that are registered as E, M, EM etc. that might do quite
well here..
And then there are always a few that just are more freeze resistant no
matter what stage of growth they are in. More sugar in their sap... ??
As for any correlation between where an iris was hybridized/selected and
it's tendency to be more or less prone to freeze damage, I would say
that hybridizers selecting cultivars in climates where they don't have
this kind of damage can't select against seedlings with that tendency
because they can't know it's there. So it will be mostly determined by
which genetic lines they are working with.
I am too tired to be making sense, I think. In any case, I had some
major damage to some new plants, but the ones that have been here &
lived thru it all before seem to be making stalks. I think JESSE'S SONG
got major bloom kill tho. As I showed in the photo, I cheated by
covering as many of the rows as I could - will post whether that seems
to have mattered. More SDBs blooming & reichenbachii budding up. TBs
seem to be out of order.
Linda Mann east Tennessee USA zone 7/8
Chuck Chapman in Canada said:
<Iris plants tolerate very cold weather when they are dormant, but when
in active growth they can be damaged by a hard frost.>
& Judy Hunt in Kentucky said:
<I can vouch for that fact, Chuck. We had some pretty warm weather early
in the year and then in mid-late March two or three nights in the high
teens...hard freezes. .... several show freeze damage. Some were
damaged pretty badly, some a little, and some have no evidence of damage
on the foliage. It would seem that the more heavily damaged ones had
broken dormancy earlier, and were in a growth stage that made them
somewhat juicier that the others. I suppose genetic makeup determines
when they break dormancy...... .... I can't correlate the damage in our
irises to the areas they were hybridized at all, though. One that is
somewhat damaged and has pale foliage at the moment was hybridized in
Kentucky. Others that show no damage at all are from west coast
hybridizers. ......Have others on the list had freeze damage in similar
circumstances this year?
Our "Freeze Queen Linda" has collected a lot of data on irises that
survive in her garden in Tennessee, but her problem is every year. Ours
happens once in a great while.>
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