Quote:
Originally Posted by CaliNative
Are the palms there damaged by the winter cold snaps ("blue northers")? Dallas gets too cold for palms in winter, correct? I don't recall seeing permanent outdoor palm plantings there. Galveston and south Texas sure.
|
Typically, it doesn't get cold enough long enough to really hurt them here, but the winter storm we had this past February was just different. We got down to at least 8F in our neighborhood one night and it was below freezing for about 70 hours and there was 8 inches of snow on the ground that took about 5 days to go away completely. Austin's airport was even colder, and actually bottomed out to 0F on February 18. That location saw its first freezing temperature with that storm on February 11 and did not get back above freezing until February 19. The coldest low was 0F at that location and the coldest high was 25F.
We lost a 25 foot tall 30 year old palm tree. I even wrapped it with a tarp as high as I could, but it was just too cold for too long. It froze and then a couple of months later the top 10 feet fell over on to our neighbor's house. It didn't cause any damage, but it took us about two hours to wrestle with it cutting it up and moving it off the roof. That was painful to have that happen as it had been a 40th birthday present for my dad in 1991, he planted it. My sister also lost both of hers that were about 12 years old. I saw a lot of them dead here and they've since been removed. Some also did die farther south as the cold air made its way all the way south of the border. I saw some that had been cut down in San Antonio this summer that no doubt had froze.
The odd thing is we have another palm tree out front of the same species, and our neighbor has two, and those are a full 30+ feet tall and are about 60 years old as they were planted when the neighborhood was built. The fronds on those three did freeze back, but they bounced back and looked good this year. I know it got cold up around the palm trees, too, because I found some fronds that had fallen off as the snow and ice started to melt and they had a ton of dead and dying yellowjackets within the crevices of the leaves. Palm trees are kind of an amazing little ecosystem. I've seen two different kinds of lizards in ours, yellowjackets, roaches, ladybugs, owls and woodpeckers.
Prev
Linear Mode
