Salem Rosemary

Yeesh! Well, here's one plant that didn't take the "arctic vortex" cold snap too well. I hope that there's still life down inside that frozen exterior. Guess I'll find out in the Spring.

Just some pretty pictures...

Yesterday, had to pull over and take pictures of the really cool rainbow. Wish my phone took better pictures - it was a full rainbow with a faint double.

Here's this morning's pretty picture - frosty foggy 26 degrees with the roads all coated in a film of tricky ice. 

Iris foliage in winter

Since it's in the 40's F today, I took a few minutes to survey the winter foliage character of various bearded irises. Typically the foliage has died back leaving very short leaves in the center of each fan. This first picture shows some of these. I'd removed most of the dead leaves from them a couple of months back when doing some Fall clean-up. But you can see how little green is showing.

And here's the reason I took the pictures... to show the contrast in the relatively "lush" clumps still showing on a batch of purpureobractea hybrid seedlings (two showing at bottom right). 'Harvest of Memories' is a little better than average but still pretty brown. The top two pictures show how seedlings with the same parents (in this case 'Kupari' X 'Rosemary's Dream') can have very different habits of growth. PBF plicata A is nearly completely dormant, while its sibling PBF plicata B has a fair bit of green still after the recent "arctic vortex" weather.

After the cold...

Here are those same Viola arvensis seedlings (hopefully hybrids with pansy) after thawing out from the "arctic vortex" weather pattern. There's some water-soaked looking foliage that I'm sure is irreversibly damaged but plenty of good foliage too.

Cold snap and Viola arvensis hybrids

I pulled the temperature data for the last two days and this morning. We bottomed out at -2 degrees F yesterday morning and hovered in the single digits for a long time. With no snow cover, this should be a good test of cold-hardiness for a lot of stuff around here, like these Viola arvensis X pansy seedlings. I'll try to get some after-freeze pictures in a couple of days (and of course whenever they bloom later in the Spring).