Garden Casualties ....

In the early hours of last Friday morning, just before I was off to bed, I noticed our cheap-and-cheerful 4-channel digital thermometer was reading -12.2 degrees C from the outdoor sensor.

It's hardly a precision instrument, more of an ornament than anything else, but its greenhouse sensor was also reading below -10 degrees and so it was worthy of further investigation.  I dug out a torch and went outside to the bottom of the garden, where I've a 'proper' mercury max-min thermometer mounted on the shed wall.

Sure enough, it was cold, -10 degrees at that time and when I checked again during the day it had been down to -11 degrees C, a record low in the ten years since we've lived here, and by quite some margin.  

coldest temperature recorded here in 10 years ...

Today, I was concerned that some of our plants might not have survived this cold, expecially since we'd had -6 degrees C or so during Wednesday night and the mercury hadn't risen above freezing all day Thursday and again on Friday before yet another frost last night, so maybe 70 hours of continuous sub-zero temperatures ...

It had warmed up a little by today, at around +1 degree, so I went out and had a good look at all the plants.

The biggest worry was our three Acca sellowiana plants, the young pineapple guavas that we'd only planted out in the ground during December.

But these look to be OK, although there's a touch of leaf curl on the newest growth of one of them.

this one seems fine ...

damage to young leaves on this one ...

However, it seems as if the cold has totally killed off our pair of Lorepetalum chinensis 'Fire Dance' shrubs.

We'd bought them small in the spring of 2018 and they'd grown into beautiful, larger specimens, surviving the two previous winters with only slight frost damage to the growing tips.

looks totally gone ...

as does its neighbour ...

not a branch with leaves that seem to be alive ...

We'll leave them in their planters until the warmer weather arrives, just in case there's any sign of life, but realistically I think it's time to start planning what we can find to replace them.

In the cold greenhouse, we're overwintering our large pot of six evergreen agapanthus plants that we'd bought from Madeira at the beginning of last year.

evergreen agapanthus ...

The leaves still seemed quite rigid today, so hopefully they'll be OK, but I'll need to keep an eye on them in case they all suddenly turn to mush.

Elsewhere, we haven't yet pruned our climbing roses and they'd already started putting on some fresh growth before the recent cold snap, although that's all been frazzled in the last few days.

Hopefully, we've now seen the last of the very cold weather this winter - after another frost again tonight, it's forecast to be +5 degrees C tomorrow and even up to +9 on Monday, so we'll quickly get rid of the remaining snow. 

However, last year we had a heavy snowfall right at the end of February, so we're not quite out of the woods as yet ...