From Our Landscape Architect: " Can My Garden Recover  from the Winter?   " by Janielle Guzinski

Well, it is now time to start the recovery process from our wintery weather this year. There are a couple of questions I keep getting about how to know what is dead, what to cut back, and how far to cut back.

 

How do I know if my plant is dead? If it's not, where do I cut it?

The easiest way to test your shrubs is to scratch the bark. If you see green underneath, the plant is still alive. You should prune back to where you see green. Keeping that dead on the plant does nothing to help it. Now you may not see green unless you dig under the surface of the soil. That means the entire top of the plant is dead, but the roots under the ground have survived and the plant will resprout from those roots. In that case, you should cut the plant to the ground.

 

What about my palms?

Some palms, especially the pygmy dates, are not looking that great. You can cut off the dead leaves now and spray the entire crown with copper to prevent any further infection of the remaining dead frond bases. It's also a good idea to do another spray two weeks after the first. I do have to say, that if you can pull out the center spear of leaves, that palm tree is dead. If the leaves can be pulled from only one trunk of a multi-trunked palm, then only that one trunk is dead.

 

What to do about tropical plants?

Many of our herbaceous tropicals took quite a hit this winter. They aren't woody and don't have trunks we can scratch, so how do we know what to do? The answer is to cut them down near the ground. Plants like ginger and orange bird of paradise will be coming back from the roots. Those damaged stalks and leaves will not be greening back up. If you have the giant white bird of paradise or other tropical plants that do have stems/trunks like red sisters or ponytail palms there are two slightly different procedures. For the giant bird, cut the leaves off of it but leave the trunk intact and let it put out new leaves. Cut down the other tropicals to where the trunk no longer feels squishy. If you need to, you can cut more later when you see where it is leafing out.