Taking Stock of Winter’s Losses

In these difficult times, I don’t have to tell you that not everything goes as planned– and that applies to gardening too. I’ve been outside checking to see what’s coming up, what’s been nibbled or dug up, and for one reason or another, didn’t survive. It turns out this year was especially hard on many plants.

Dealing with Foliar Dessication

This winter in southeastern Pennsylvania was especially hard on shallow-rooted evergreens and anything prone to high wind exposure. No snow cover and a drier than usual winter, coupled with a few extremely frigid, windy January days was all it took to kill nearly all of my heaths and heathers. Heathers are slow growers anyway, and to lose them after five years of careful nurture is truly heartbreaking. Unfortunately they are in a spot with brutal wind exposure, and this year proved their undoing. A row of Japanese hollies, planted two years ago along the neighbors’ drive have major dieback, some by more than half. After suffering snow breakage two winters ago to slowly rally over the summer, this winter did them in.

What is Dessication?

Dessication, also called winter burn, is essentially dried out foliage due to more moisture loss than the plant can replenish, resulting in foliar death. It strikes broadleaf evergreens primarily, whose leaves are normally green in winter. Rhododendron, laurels, Southern magnolias and heathers often fall victim. Affected leaves turn completely brown. The condition is usually caused by high winds coupled with dry soil and freezing temperatures. The more exposed the plant, the more vulnerable it is.

While there is no remedy once dessication occurs, an effective preventive strategy is to spray vulnerable plants in fall with a product like Wilt-pruf, which coats the leaves with a wax to slow down moisture loss and insulate leaf tissue. I did spray our Schip laurels, and they came through fine. Sadly I forgot the holly and heathers — and paid the price. I’ve noticed other peoples’ laurels, and many have severe damage this year. So sad, and an expensive investment lost.

Other Losses

If it’s not the weather, it’s the animals wreaking havoc. Squirrels dug up all my snowdrops. Deer tromped heavily all over the beds in their quest for food, punching deep holes everywhere and inadvertently uprooting camassia bulbs that then simply rotted on the surface.

My Chief Joseph lodgepole pine, a gorgeous golden cultivar native to the higher elevations of the western US, started out great two years ago. Last summer it began to lose vigor, clearly not thriving in our hot and humid summer. After this winter, it’s now on life support. Too bad. That is the risk of planting specialty specimens far from their preferred habitat — climate extremes can easily do them in.

To top things off, this year we experienced a new menace to the garden– a clueless contractor.

Beware of “Contractor Dumping”

We began remodelling our master bathroom just before Christmas and the job went on until the beginning of March. In mid-February, the tile installers surrepititiously dumped their wastewater onto my flowerbeds. Shortly after they left, I discovered a large puddle of nasty-looking deposits all over my weeping hemlock and St. John’s wort “Golden Rule,” a beautiful groundcover that I’ve been unable to find for sale for several years now, even on wait lists. It’s normally a gorgeous plant and one of my favorites, but thanks to the clueless tile guy, it might already be history.

Grout sludge contains high amounts of alkali. Worse, the affected plants are acid lovers. The stuff was also pitched onto our mature spruces, leaving white streaks across the needles like giant bird droppings. But the worst was on the hemlock and Golden Rule.

When I confronted the tile guy about what he did, he claimed he deliberately poured it on my plants because “all plants love it.” (Wow.) I tried to explain that’s really not the case but I doubt I convinced him otherwise. At any rate, the damage is done.

I consulted our arborist; he says he frequently sees plants killed by chemicals and waste from contractors (and homeowners). He suggested we manually remove as much as possible, flush the area with water and hope for the best.

Mitigating the Damage

We removed the gunk and tried to dilute the toxic residuals as best we could. A quick soil test indicated the soil was now definitely alkaline. There are products you can apply to correct out-of-balance ph. In this case, I carefully added aluminum sulfate and flushed the spot well with more water. I’ll add compost and Holly-tone shortly, then retest every few weeks and adjust accordingly. If the hemlock dies it can be replaced, but the Golden Rule unfortunately cannot. I’m hoping at least some of it escaped death; if so, I’ll take cuttings and try to propagate more plants.

What a pain in the butt!

Lesson learned: If you hire contractors who will be making a mess or using chemicals, be sure to proactively tell them what to do with any waste before they dump it in your garden! Or tell them to haul it out.

It’s still too early to see what else didn’t make it, but if your garden sustained losses this winter, know that you’ve got lots of company. We gardeners just have to look at it as an opportunity to plant something new in its place.