Cold Climate Gardening

This photo was taken two days before the digital thermometer bottomed out in January 2005Quite a while ago, someone emailed me, asking what was a cold climate. I never did answer them, because I thought it was obvious. A cold climate is any climate too cold to grow the plants you really want to grow. If you live in Austin, and you want to grow pineapples outdoors, obviously your climate is too cold. If you live next door to me, and you want to grow crape myrtles; sorry, you live in a cold climate.

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What I saw this morning [Photographer: Kathy Purdy]Just in case there’s anyone reading this who doesn’t yet understand what a cold climate is (I’ve had Australian searchers looking for “hardy plants” arrive at this site), I thought I’d give an illustration. When I got up about an hour earlier, the outdoor temperature was 36 degrees F (that’s 2 degrees C for you Australians–and the rest of the world). Checking my electronic gadget’s memory, I learn that the low was 35.8 degrees F at 5:47am.

At dinner last night everyone was remarking on what perfect weather we had had that day, and how we could take a whole summer like it.

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The Intimate Garden: Twenty Years and Four Seasons in Our Garden by Gordon and Mary Hayward belongs to the rare breed of landscape design book that is actually helpful:
One private residential garden–not little glimpses of a dozen gardens
The garden was developed over many years. (They figured it out as they went along)
They tell you the problem, solutions considered, and what they finally implemented
They tell you about their mistakes, and how they corrected them
There is a labeled map of the whole gardenI only know of one other book with the same scope that is so helpful, and that is Mary Keen’s Creating a Garden. But Mary Keen lives in Great Britain, and even while drooling over the gorgeous photos of her garden, I’m always wondering, “Is that hardy here?”

The Haywards, on the other hand, live in Vermont, in Zone 4, and I can be fairly certain that if a plant grows for them, it will grow for me.

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The trouble with that platitude is that Spring is so erratic around here that we often don’t recognize it when it comes. For the next eight weeks or so, every time we hit a spell of bad weather, we will repeat to ourselves, and each other, “Well, spring is right around the corner.” But we’re never quite sure which corner is the corner.

We all think we recognize Spring when we encounter it.

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In my series on Garden Blog Pioneers, I reported in the final part that Notes From Zone 4 was MIA. Well, they’re back.

If you ever had doubts that a cold climate garden could look good, take one look at their banner image and doubt no more. Then, appetite whetted, browse through their gallery. A sight for snow-blinded eyes.

As noted in their About section and other places on the site, they are very involved in raising animals now, and the garden takes a back seat. But of course, even in the animal department, they don’t do things halfway. I had never heard of Icelandic sheep, and wasn’t aware that any sheep breed could live on the …

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I don’t have any bare ground for crocus to be poking up through–we have at least 18 inches of snow on the ground. Is it because the crocus are near the heated greenhouse that they are coming up? I hope some time this winter you and Judy both can tell us what size and type greenhouse you each have, what criteria you used in choosing your greenhouse, and what, if anything, you would do differently if you were going to purchase one again.

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I had always thought you were in Zone 4, Ro, but when I consult my most detailed copy of the USDA Hardiness Zone map (which I got in an old issue of Fine Gardening) I see you actually are listed as Zone 5. Not that the map is the last word on what zone you are. When we first moved here in 1989, we had at least a week of winter lows to minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. In 1993 it got even lower. But somewhere along the line, the winters started getting warmer. It’s gotten to the point where I’m surprised when we get subzero temperatures.

So, were those cold temperatures just a fluke, or are these warmer winters a …

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