LOL! Is there such a word as “succumber”? I couldn’t think of a noun antonym to “survivor” that ended in -er or -or, so made that one up. Possibly, though, it’s more closely related to “cucumber”?
Spent most of the day yesterday thrashing around the yard. The late frost was one of the strangest climatic episodes I’ve seen here in the low desert. Plants I expected would die made it through just fine, and plants I thought were pretty cold-hardy croaked right over.
The orange and lemon trees suffered more damage than they did in the harder frost we had several years ago, when they were less mature. About half the harvest of candy-sweet oranges is ruined — some pieces are still juicy and good; others are dried out. The Meyer lemon is dropping all its big, ripe fruit into the mud. I’ve tried to give them away to friends but don’t know whether anything remaining can be salvaged. If the hardier oranges are parched, the inside of those lemons must be sawdust.
The lime tree may be lost. Though I hung a couple of shop lights on its limbs, there was nothing I could do to cover it — the tree had grown taller than the roof. At least half of it froze back; it remains to be seen how much more will die.
Click on the images for higher resolution.
I picked the wrong time to have the trees pruned! The parts of the lime that survived were the areas sheltered by the adjacent devil-pod tree. Just a few days before the freeze, the arborist removed a large limb that hovered menacingly over the house — and that also overhung the lime tree. Probably less of the lime would have been blighted had that big limb still been in place.
It will have to stay untrimmed until well after the heat comes up. It will be weeks, maybe months, before we know how much it it will come back.
The yellow oleander also looks like a goner:
Weirdly, this tree did much better in the last frost, which was colder and lasted longer. This year we only had a couple of nights in the low thirties and high twenties. The last frost seemed to go on and on, and as I recall it came and went through several episodes.
On the other hand, that last big frost came with rain. This year has been droughtier than droughty — not a drop of rain in sight. So the plants probably were stressed to begin with, since I cut back the irrigation (which isn’t very effective to begin with) in the winter.
I hope the yellow oleander doesn’t die. It’s a pretty little tree that’s covered with bright yellow blossoms all spring and summer. Most of its limbs are still springy, giving some hope that the leaves may come back. However, with no viable leaves at all, right now it can’t photosynthesize, so my sense is that what we have here is very slim hope, indeed.
Even highly xeric plants, including these agaves and cacti, died back:
Ouch! We’ll be paying Gerardo a nice bonus for shoveling out that mess.
The bougainvillea back there only looks dead. Bougs hate frost and instantly convert themselves to dried arrangements at the first sign of cold. But they’ll come back. The trick is to leave them looking like that, without pruning off the dead stuff, until the weather is good and hot. Along about May, we’ll be able to see which limbs are really dead and which are just hibernating.
Some plants that I covered also died back. Everyplace the sheets and towels touched the potted ficus tree’s leaves, it fried:
Ficus are notoriously touchy about environmental changes, though. Some of these limbs may regrow their leaves, so here, too, I’ll have to wait until the weather has been warm for awhile to see how much needs to be cut back.
I knew the red salvia would freeze, despite being covered. What I didn’t expect, though, is that most of the eight plants that went in last summer would survive! When I went to pull them out yesterday, what should I discover but new growth at the base of the dead sticks:
This was quite a surprise — I’ve rarely seen salvia live through a frost.
I was certain the new gardens I’ve planted over the past few weeks would be flattened, and that all the new bulbs would be frozen underground. But no! In front, the only loss was a lovely little lavender plant. Everything else, even the mint, made it.
Some of the bulbs I planted out there have even started to grow!
I think these are lilies of the valley. But am not sure. Whatever…they look promising. And their appearance bodes well for the survival of the other bulbs lurking in that bed.
Turns out to have been a good thing I pulled the four unwaterable roses out of the front flowerbed and the two in the light-starved westside bed. I’m getting too old to cope with 89 gerjillion rose bushes. Yesterday I pruned the three in back and was just done in by the job. The back, legs, and foot hurt something awful after what seemed like not much exertion.
Though it must be allowed that “not much exertion” did entail hoeing and shoveling 50 or 100 pounds of damp gravel back from one rose to build an enlarged watering pan, hauling rocks over to line it, emptying the new stuff out of the compost bin and digging the fully composted material from the bottom of the bin, shoveling it into the wheelbarrow, and depositing it around two of the roses, and then refilling the compost bin with the uncomposted stuff. That was a bit of a job, I suppose.
This very pretty rose has been struggling with only one piddly little dripper and with the crushed granite top dressing right up against its trunk. It makes a beautiful orange and red flower, but they never last long because the plant is perennially heat- and drought-stressed.
🙂 Found that piece of flagstone buried under the crushed granite. Next time I’m at Baker’s or Summerwinds, I’ll look for a kitsch frog or some such to set on there. Though I have a Talavera frog pot with a cactus in it, Gerardo’s underlings invariably break anything made of pottery that’s left in their way. Baker’s sells molded resin turtles
At any rate, this pushes the broiling hot granite back from the rose, and it also gives the rose some new and very rich compost.
Also dug in some systemic fertilizer/disease control, since all three plants are showing signs of blackspot and something that’s turning leaves yellow and stunting them.
Closer to the house, a vigorous, large perfumed delight rose struggles through the hot summer.
The trees don’t block enough of the fierce afternoon sun to save it from fricasseeing, and the stupid drippers, even with the largest gallons-per-minute gadget available, don’t give it enough water. It’s a bit out of the way, too, and so I often forget to drag the hose to it when I’m adding extra water to the other plants. That notwithstanding, over a summer it’ll grow as tall as me.
I didn’t prune either of these back as far as I probably should have, because they’re so stressed it’s hard to tell which canes are likely to live and which not. So I removed the diseased and damaged foliage and the canes that obviously were already dead, but tried to leave enough healthy-looking stuff for the plants to keep puttering along as it gets warmer — which is happening very rapidly.
The unruly, ferally beautiful blue plumbago morphed into a gawdawful haystack.
I was about to cut it back to the ground, but thought better of it after having googled care of frost-bitten blue plumbago. While the site linked above says plumbago responds well to pruning, another site says it’s best to wait and see what parts of the plant come back after a frost before pruning.
After the last frost, it died all the way back, and I thought it was gone. As in gone gone. And in fact, the plant that had been put in the flowerbed was gone. This thing sprouted from roots that had extended outside the bed — it actually is growing (or was growing…) just on the other side of the decrepit railroad tie some long-previous owner used to build that bed.
{sigh} There’s going to be a lot of dead foliage sitting around the yard this spring, then. Not only the walloped plumbago but five hammered bougainvilleas, the decimated lime tree, the slammed yellow oleander….lovely.
Oh well. At least some survived. And of course the deciduous vitex and desert willow soon will be back in their full glory.
Desert willow image: Stan Shebs. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.