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Enjoying the
Arriving Winter Landscape
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The calendar winter won’t begin
for another two months, but the first significant
snow of the approaching winter season muted the
already fading fall foliage of trees and shrubs.
The not unusually early snow marked at least the
unofficial beginning of the long visual winter of
the Wyobraska landscape. If the past several
“winters” are any indication, we will likely have
several prolonged periods of nice fall-like weather
before the true winter weather officially arrives
sometime in December. All the better to enjoy
those colorful shrub roses, fall perennials, rusty
ornamental grasses, and re-emerging evergreen trees
and shrubs that give the fall Wyobraska landscape
such a diverse and distinctive visual interest.
It is probably not too
surprising that Wyobraska homeowners tend to be
concerned about how their landscape plants will fare
through the winter season. After all, for us
humans, the cold and snow of winter make it the most
uncomfortable, and probably also the most
life-threatening season. But worrying about how
your garden or landscape plants will do through the
winter season is mostly a waste of otherwise useful
anxiety. |
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The greatest risk to cold hardy
landscape plants in Wyobraska is from overly dry
soil around their roots. Wyobraska winters often
include long periods of relatively warm, dry, and
windy weather, followed by a stretch of extremely
cold weather. This combination of weather can dry
out the soil around the roots of landscape plants
like trees and shrubs, and expose the roots of
plants to injury from cold soil temperatures. Dry
soil gets sufficiently colder than moist soil to
allow for root injury during winters worst cold
snaps—especially if there is no snow on the ground.
The solution is simple—make
sure that your trees and shrubs are adequately
mulched going into winter, and then if we are having
long periods of warm, dry, and windy weather at any
point during the winter, get out the hose and
sprinkler and do a little watering. It’s rarely
necessary to water more than once a month through
the winter, by the way.
One other slight winter risk
that can be reduced by proper landscape care is the
risk that trees and shrubs will emerge from winter
dormancy too early in the spring. This can result
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Previous Articles
April 27, 2006
Crazy Clematis
May 04, 2006
Ornamental Grasses
May 11, 2006
Perennials
May 18, 2006
Herbs
May 25, 2006
Hummingbird Garden
Party
June 1, 2006
Gardening with Kids
June 8, 2006
Wildflower Week
June 15th
Shade Garden
June 29
Thumbs,
Feathers, Fruit
July 6, 2006
Reading Plants
July 13th
Back to the Oregon
Trail
July 20th
Theatre West Garden
Walk
July 27th
Notes from the Garden Walk
August 4th
Cereal Killers
August 10th
Grass Hedges
August 17th
Xeriscape
Refresher Course
August 24th
Fall is for
Planting
August 31st
Tree Roots at the
Old Pen
September 7th
Recipe for Enjoying
Autumn Landscapes
September 14th
On the Road to Casper
September 15th
Fall is in the Air
October 5th
Seeing Red
October 13th
To Rake or Not to
Rake
Coming Soon
A Prairie Garden Journal
Searchable Archives |
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For plants, winter may actually
be the least dangerous season of the year. We
humans see our plants standing out in the long cold
days and nights of winter, picture ourselves in
their place, and imagine their situation to be as
difficult as it would be if we were in their place.
But for cold hardy landscape plants, spending the
winter out-of-doors is no more stressful than the
winter hibernation of a bear asleep in its cave.
Once a tree or shrub has successfully completed its
physiological transition into dormancy sometime in
mid to late autumn, cold winter weather poses little
threat to its survival, or, so far as we can know,
to its “comfort”.
As plant scientists have had
the opportunity to study the changes in the internal
functioning of plants through their annual cycle of
the spring, summer, fall, and winter seasons, they
have come to understand that winter is a period of
relative inactivity for most dormant, cold-hardy
plants. And furthermore, that well developed
processes protect the living tissues of those plants
from potential harm from winter’s cold and often
windy weather. Those processes are so
well-developed that a dormant tree, out in the
middle of the worst winter weather is literally as
snug as a hibernating bear asleep in its den.
That said, there are a few
risks to landscape plants that are worth worrying
about, but which can be easily avoided with
relatively little effort—and absolutely no
anxiety.
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freezing damage to new leaves and stems and can
result in a significant loss in the plant’s stored
energy reserves.
This risk can be reduced by insuring that landscape
soils are moist during the late winter and early
spring period. I occasionally hear homeowners
speculate that they are afraid that if they water
their trees or shrubs in the early spring, the trees
or shrubs will emerge from dormancy earlier. If
anything, just the opposite is true. Watering will
usually delay emergence from dormancy, because moist
soil also warms more slowly in the spring than dry
soil. Again, an adequate mulch layer also tends to
keep soil temperatures cooler and produces a slow,
gradual rise of soil temperatures in the spring,
thus having the effect of delaying the emergence of
plants from winter dormancy until later in the
spring. That reduces the risk to plants of injury
from those unpredictable late season frosts which
seem to occur every few years.
There is little, if anything, else to do for your
landscape plants that will make their coming winter
experience any more enjoyable. And now that you
know they’re not suffering out there in your
wintertime landscape, you can relax and enjoy the
coming winter, too.
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