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Freeze Frames

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 12, 2008

So your beloved backyard now looks like the charred remains of Kansas City in "The Day After."

The hardy purple porterweed? Pulverized. Gentle jatropha? Done to a crisp.

Scorched skeletal remains and quivering jaundiced shrubs, that's what the freeze left behind. And, oh my, looking at it feels every bit as bad as watching the survivors succumb to radiation poisoning in that 1980s nuclear disaster movie.

But atomic bomb this was not. If we're talking disaster movies, this was more of a "Twister," the experts say. And remember, almost everybody in that one survives.

"A lot of damage had to do with the direction of the wind," says Marina D'Abreau, horticulture agent with the Hillsborough County Extension. "We had one golden dewdrop, it's out in the open, every leaf is brown. Three others on the west side, up against the building, they barely had some tip burn."

Just like a twister might hopscotch through a neighborhood, the tibouchina you covered is toast, while the one you forgot seems to think it's May.

Plants up close to houses tended to fare better; materials like stucco and brick hold some heat from the sun, says Mike Dickens, owner of Mike's Premier Landscape Services in Zephyrhills. Plants protected by trees or large shrubbery tended to catch a break, too.

But even in the worst cases, there should be mostly happy endings. Many of the most popular landscape plants are Scarlett O'Haras, beautiful and seemingly fragile but capable of impressive rebounds. That is, if gardeners can resist the temptation to cut away all that unsightly dead stuff until about March 15.

The brown leaves help protect the plant if there's another freeze, and cutting back promotes new growth, which is very susceptible to the cold.

Yes, that's a bit like telling someone not to scream during "Towering Inferno." So maybe just a trim or two. To get you through.

Down at the extension office, wherein dwells perhaps the highest concentration of garden wisdom in the county, they're cutting. A little.

"We have to. For aesthetic reasons. It's a public garden," D'Abreau says. "Just the popcorn cassia and the firebush. That's it. Everything else, we're waiting."

Penny Carnathan

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