Gardener recommends replacing lost vegetation before heat hits

This winter’s freezing temperatures and cold fronts have left many Brownsville landscapes damaged or dead.

If you’re ready to replant, local gardener Eddy Hockaday says now is the time — before the wilting heat of summer sets in.

Hockaday, who works at Home Depot in Brownsville, said he is among the many Rio Grande Valley residents who lost trees and plants when early February rain and freezing temperatures encased the landscape in ice.

“Any bedding plants and any flowering plants – you can start putting them back in before it starts to get really hot,” Hockaday said.

Hockaday, who has owned a farm for years, said he lost both plants and trees during the recent cold snaps, and he recommends replacing bedding plants — those grouped with other plants to produce visual appeal — right away because they can be more quickly replaced than dead or damaged trees.

“Basic trees were lost, but the older trees — the 25-year-old, 35-to-40-year-old trees — were burned really badly,” he said.

To offset some of the loss of greenery, Hockaday said, careful trimming can help revive growth to surviving plants. However, most property owners seemed to trim their plants right away, which could have hurt the plants. And had the weather suddenly got cold again, trimmed plants could have been seriously damaged all over again.

With that in mind, Hockaday was still waiting to trim his plants. He planned to watch them carefully with an eye to the weather, and said he will probably decide to start trimming this week, or once he is certain warmer weather is on the way.

Aside from flowers and shrubs, the most common losses were palm trees, which die easily if the core of the plant is not carefully guarded from cold temperatures.

“Watch the center of the palm,” Hockaday said. “There’s always a center piece, and when it starts to turn brown and it falls over, then (the tree) is dead.”

At that point, the best thing to do is dig out the palm and replace it with another.

He recommends carefully considering replacement plantings with the South Texas climate in mind. One reason for the high number of dead palms, he said, might simply be that many were not selected according to the area’s plant hardiness zone.

For gardeners, plant hardiness zones help match regions with the plants most likely to thrive there. Basic laboratory testing helps determine the lowest and highest sustained temperature a particular plant species can withstand, and those plants are assigned a particular range for established temperature per zone.

Plant-zoning maps vary from source to source, but the border area is most often listed in zone 9 or 10. Those zones are relatively hotter zones than the rest of the country, which means that anything you plant should be able to withstand winter temperatures as low as 30 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit, but might still might need additional protection during a freeze.

Frost-sensitive plants are obviously the most likely to die in a freeze, even if owners take steps to protect them from the cold, Hockaday said. However, frost-resistant plants or flowers for should have fared fairly well with covering or wrapping.

After the freeze, many people bought replacement plants and shrubs like the Japanese Boxwood because they hold up better during a freeze.

Hockaday stressed that the best time to start replanting flowers or fertilizing the soil for lawns is right now. Spring is right around the corner, he said, and if you wait too long, your newly plants and flowers will suffer from the heat before they’re firmly established.

Water well, he added, and your replanted garden or landscape should soon be back to its pre-freeze beauty.