Re: cold, hardiness, and lies
- Subject: Re: cold, hardiness, and lies
- From: E* W*
- Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 07:57:18 -0700
Barry,
Rating hardiness of plants by temperature is a tricky business. Some plants
die from heavy wet soils in the winter, some plants take much lower
temperatures when they are slowly harden off by progressive cooler temps as
opposed to sudden drops in temperature and of course then there is the
geographic location/elevation of where your specific plant originally was
collected in the wild, which can make a huge difference. And then we need to
look at micro climates, humidity, wind, mulching, what kind of fertilizers
where applied to the plant in summer/fall and who knows what other factors
are involved. Horticulture is often described as an art and a science and
this is a perfect example of why rating a plant by an exact temperature range
is as clear as a summer time view in the heavy fog along the California
coast.
When I lived in Arcata, Calfornia, which is way up in Humboldt County one
county away from the Oregon border I often walked by a garden that had
unusual and uncommon plants for that part of California. When I asked the
owner how she determined what she could grow in her garden, she told me "I
looked it up in the Sunset Western Garden book and if they said it wouldn't
grow here, then I planted it." I suspect that many of us in the Medit Plant
group are always testing the hardiness range of plants and coming up with
results that would rewrite most garden books. Perhaps our questioning and
testing of whether a specific plant will grow where we live and garden is one
of the most rewarding aspects of gardening.
Ernie Wasson
California Central Coast
Aptos, CA
