Cold Climate Gardening

It’s about time! Wayne Winterrowd and Joe Eck, co-authors of A Year at North Hill : Four Seasons in a Vermont Garden and Living Seasonally: The Kitchen Garden and the Table at North Hill, and individually the authors of several more books and numerous magazine articles, finally have a website showcasing their wonderful garden, North Hill.

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That is the question–sorry, Hamlet. And White Flower Farm has some help with the answer: an article on Plants Slow to Break Dormancy. They have a lot of other articles in the Newsletter section of their Garden Help.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Another good source of information on cold climate gardening is the University of Minnesota Extension Service. Their online publications catalog is not organized for easy perusal, I’m afraid. Ornamental Grasses for Cold Climates is located under the Landscaping - Plant Selection. Roses for the North is under Flowers - Culture. It is probably better to use the search engine provided if you have a specific topic in mind, but it was easier to browse under their previous organization. Some of their more popular titles have free excerpts available for download, so it’s worth taking the time to see what they’ve got.

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Just like you, Judy, “I like having an idea of whether [a plant] would turn to slime come April before I spend money on it.” I’m always on the lookout for sources of information that keep me from reinventing the wheel. Woody Landscape Plant Cold-Hardiness Ratings, Technical Bulletin #156 from the Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station, is one of the first sources of information I found. UMaine maintains the Lyle E. Littlefield Ornamentals Trial Garden in Orono. According to the Introduction, “the site is in USDA hardiness zone 4a having suffered winter temperatures as low as -30 degrees F. three times in the last 6 years.” (This was published in 1994.) The plants are grown without winter protection …

Popularity: 5% [?]