Winter Damage

Hey, we hit 0 degrees today and 3 degrees is just a couple days away.  I can't stop thinking about spring but I know it's months away. 

I made it to the cottage this weekend and I thought I would report on any snow damage.  The deep snow cover is probably helping a lot my evergreen plants (Mahonia, Pieris, Fargesia, Ilex, Leucothoe, Rhodos etc..) escape the brutal PEI wind chills.  I think the constant wind will be the limiting factor for overwintering my phyllostachys when they get bigger.  I am going to work on moving some of them this summer into more protected sites.  I headed out on the snowshoes this weekend and found some great microclimates to take advantage of.  I didn't snap any pictures.  I think I was too excited and my mind was racing with ideas.  The clearings are in the middle of mature black spruce, scotch pine and red pine stands.  They were cut out by my father in law 8 years ago but have been ignored since.  I never found them before because the vegetation has grown up so much over the last 8 years that any sign of the trails have been camouflaged.  However, with no leaves on the shrubs and a height advantage of 3+ feet of snow we were able to navigate the old trail system.  Now that I know it, we will bush-hog it all down this spring and reclaim the trails.  I think I will try Phyllostachys rubromaginata, aureosulcata and bissetii in these protected sites.

When we had the eclipse a few months ago, we also happened to have a storm surge on the same weekend.  It caused a lot of damage on the east coast but the cottage was relatively unscathed.  The tides were exagerated by the storm surge and the eclipse and this led to some really high water.  It washed out part of the shoreline and left us with 3 huge spruce to clean up this spring.   Check out the root system in the pic below.  We might tow up the root system and incorporate it into the garden somehow.

While walking around I took a shot of this old stump because of the cool striations and colors.  I wish I had a photographer who documenting things for me.  I usually forget to snap pictures and I only sport a simple point and shoot.  This one still turned out pretty nice.

 
All my Phyllostachys are bent over and pinned under plastic to the ground.  They are safely?  under the snow.  Hopefully the weight of the snow doesn't cause the canes to snap.  I didn't protect any of the Fargesia and there were a few leaves that were visible.

Leucothoe

 Mahonia

 Fargesia nitida

 Fargesia murielae

 Fargesia rufa

Everything else is completely covered by snow.  These were the only exposed plants.

The wind toppled over an old black spruce but luckily a heroic apple tree managed to stop the spruce from crushing my very small Acer palmatum 'Butterfly'  The picture below is almost comical. 

Taking care of this tree will be a priority as soon as the snow melts.  Hopefully the apple tree can hold up until then. 

Well, back to watching the Phyllostachys aurea grow inside.  Most of the culms have topped out and are starting to send out branches.