Damage

Two bouts with winter so far. The first, two or three weeks ago, seemed shorter, but colder with temperatures to 20F, and we brought some potted plants in, especially azalea cuttings that are a couple years old now. In the past we’d brought dozens of plants inside, but we are late seventies and Linda nixed it. So some were lost. We dripped faucets, but one exposed outside pipe, up the west side of the house to a second floor bathroom, froze. A frozen and burst pipe is a nightmare, BTDT, and this shouldn’t have happened, because my father showed me 25 or 30 years ago which pipes in this house are at risk. However, a nearby hose was working, running, so I sprayed water on the frozen pipe a few minutes until it thawed.

The avocado tree still had a couple of avocados on it, we picked them so they didn’t freeze. Avocado keep growing to their mature size, but they don’t seem to start ripening, softening, until they’re picked. From day of picking to ready to eat, at least with ours, is four to five days. Five years or so ago we had our first crop, about a dozen or so, really superb, delicious avocados. The following years we waited expectantly, but nothing at all until this year, then about five, all unimaginably good.

This week’s cold spell went to 26F by thermometers here, but was longer, a couple days where it didn’t seem to get above 28F. We brought nothing in. The azalea cuttings all seem fine, but a lot of other plants didn’t make it. The avocado tree may be OK, one year it froze and had to be cut back to the ground, I hope that's not the case this year. The leaves, which normally stay on lush and green all year round, are frozen dead, we’ll have to see how the tree itself is come spring. It’s special to us, having been started from a seed that Linda sprouted in a glass of water in the kitchen window a dozen years ago.

The camellias seem OK, except that camellias are the darndest plants. They bloom in the winter, starting before Christmas, in time for mothers to make corsages for their sons to take to their girlfriends for the Christmas Ball -- which my mother did from these plants, for Linda when we were in high school. But when there’s a freeze, the buds turn brown and either drop off or open with ugly brown blossoms. Why haven’t camellias evolved to bloom in the fall or spring instead of winter? Maybe they are doing that, who knows, I guess we'll know in another thousand years. Or maybe they don’t care that I don’t like the brown blossoms.

Lots of other plants are dead from these two freezes, but it’s not an issue, because there was too much to take care of, even in Patty’s Garden. But there's a certain bleakness. Winter of 2014. Begone.