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FeedUnder Wraps
Anticipate spring as you cover your garden for winter
By bonnie blodgett
Photo by Judy White, www.GardenPhotos.com
(page 1 of 2)
Because plants are living things, and because people like to think all living things have feelings, gardeners—who are, after all, people—tend to follow their emotions when choosing how to prepare a garden for winter.Some of us, fearing the worst as our plants turn drab and lifeless in late fall, rush to comfort them. We put our perennials to bed under a blanket of fallen leaves, straw, or pine boughs. We liberally swath the trunks of trees to protect them from sunscald and hungry varmints. We give evergreens in unprotected spots even more elaborate care: burlap barriers protect them from sudden cold snaps, sun and wind damage; anti-desiccant sprays help them retain moisture.
The other type of gardener practices tough love. If a plant has earned a Zone 4 hardiness rating, surely it’s perfectly capable of surviving conditions far worse than our recent wimpy winters. Any plant that can’t cope on its own doesn’t belong here, so this reasoning goes. Better to force it to adapt or let nature put it out of its misery than to prolong its presumably wretched existence through artificial means.
I belong to category number one. I’m not a plant-whisperer yet (but give me a few more years and I’m sure you’ll find me chatting amiably with my pansies and hugging the hostas to welcome them back each spring). Nor am I a church-goer: Spring is the miracle of rebirth that sustains my faith. Uncovering my garden is a ritual I relish and begin to anticipate even as I’m putting the finishing touches on my foot-high leaf piles and burlap barriers. I like to think I’m improving the odds that my beloved plants will make it through the winter. The effort keeps me connected to them and makes them—yes, I admit it—dependent on me.
Still, a part of me is fully aware that come spring I will have my regrets. I will find at least one delicate primrose battling a fungus because I waited too long to remove its leaf blanket, a tulip flopping over because its flower is too heavy for its sun-deprived stem, or a mass of dead nettle uprooted by the tines of my overzealous rake.
Understanding how plants react to changing weather conditions is invaluable in helping those who tend toward extreme winter-garden preparation behave more sensibly. In late summer as plants appear to be growing sickly unto death, they’re actually just shifting their priorities. Instead of pouring their energy into reproduction (flowers and seeds), they’re going into survival mode. For perennials this means protecting their root system, the most vital of plant tissues. The human body works the same way, with the torso (i.e., the main arteries around the heart) taking precedence over the extremities, when under stress.
Roots are also the tissues most sensitive to cold. As temperatures fluctuate more widely due to global warming, adequate snow cover never seems to accumulate before the mercury suddenly drops, leaving roots exposed. Freeze-thaw cycles can even cause the soil to heave, uprooting plants that don’t have proper insulation. Plants in containers are doubly at risk because their roots have even less protection. That’s why in the Upper Midwest, container plants are always removed from their pots and planted in the ground or brought inside when evening temperatures begin to drop.
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