Gardens Try to Cope With the Big Chill of December : Horticulture: Rare and exotic plants are among the wilted casualties in the region’s botanical showplaces.
Like a battlefield surgeon, Debra Folsom trudged along damp, muddy grounds, surveying the dead and the dying.
“You can see these jades were absolutely devastated,” said Folsom, research botanist at the Huntington Botanical Gardens, as she passed through the San Marino estate’s desert garden earlier this week.
Later, she approached a dead hibiscus and dead bougainvillea at the garden’s entrance. “This,” she said, “is most disturbing.”
For caretakers at some of the region’s premier garden showplaces, the most disturbing consequences of December’s freeze--the worst in recent decades--are only now being felt. The botanists are discovering on a much grander scale what many Los Angeles County home gardeners are also finding out.
“The plants that weren’t killed outright by the cold are just starting to show the damage,” said Kathy Musial, the Huntington’s curator of living collections.
Dead tree tops now tower over the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum in Arcadia.
Plants and shrubs from subtropical, tropical and even temperate climes at the county’s Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge look as if they were singed by a forest fire.
Magnificent jade plants and exotics at Huntington appear to have been melted with blow torches.
At Pitzer College’s tiny arboretum in Claremont, whole chunks of prize cholla cacti are “like gummy popsicles,” the director said.
And the South Coast Botanic Gardens, an 87-acre county facility on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, reports losing thousands of palm and ficus trees--every one planted in the last three years.
The delayed reaction is occurring because the leaves of some plants survived up to now on stored-up chlorophyll, said James P. Folsom, curator of botanical gardens at the Huntington. “It takes the tissue a while to give up the ghost,” he said.
It will be weeks and perhaps months--until at least mid-March, when the official frost season ends--before the damage can be fully assessed, said county Arboretum Supt. John Provine.
At each garden, casualty lists are being painstakingly compiled every day. “The damage is severe. We just don’t know to what extent,” Provine said.
“This is what you call a 50-year freeze,” said Clair Martin III, curator of roses at the Huntington. Although essentially freeze-dried, the roses incurred only superficial damage.
In reviewing their records, Huntington officials say the winter of 1937, and that of 1949 to a somewhat lesser degree, were the last times such a severe cold damaged as many plants.
Temperature records at Descanso Gardens showed 14 days in a row of below-freezing temperatures, beginning on Dec. 14 and dropping to the lowest point of 18 degrees on Dec. 23. It was so cold that a pond near the Descanso entrance froze for the first time in recent memory, said Supt. Steven M. Cohan.
Some priceless, one-of-a-kind plants--collected as seeds from exotic locations such as Madagascar--have been killed, said Joe Clements, curator of the Huntington’s desert garden. Replacement plants might cost as much as $1,000 apiece, if they can be found, Clements and Cohan said.
But the Huntington is prepared. Clements said it maintains in its greenhouses “understudy” plants for each exotic in the gardens. The greenhouse plants can be used to propagate new ones, he said, but the process is laborious and time-consuming.
None of the officials could offer a detailed death count or dollar loss. However, they indicated that the institutions’ popular and lucrative annual spring plant sales may feel the chill of the freeze.
Yet even within the dark and frozen clouds, the horticulturists report finding more than one silver lining.
For example, Clements said he told a gardener who works with him at the Huntington: “The bad news is we lost all the plants. The good news is (the freeze) killed the agave snout weevil.”
Indeed, Huntington botanists speculate the cold may temporarily have knocked out the Mediterranean fruit fly and white ash flies that have plagued the region.
Clements and others said the chill will produce its own pruning of a sorts. “We get to be like a jungle,” he said, “and now it’s like the frost is pruning it away.”
Some gardens seem to have weathered the frost with little damage. “One aloe looks a little sad,” said David Verity, curator of UCLA’s eight-acre botanical garden. But he has found no “significant damage” to the garden’s many cold-sensitive tropical plants because, as is usually the case, the cold snap was less intense in Westwood than in other parts of Los Angeles County.
The 200-plus acre Huntington was less fortunate. Officials reported that some out-of-towners who visited the garden during the Pasadena Tournament of Roses were disappointed to find dead plants on display.
Provine, of the Arboretum, which is toured by up to 4,000 visitors on mild, midwinter weekends, said he is concerned that attendance may soon drop. “A lot of things that were nice and green are now brown. Our colors now are mainly green grass and brown trees,” he said.
But as she toured the Huntington’s gardens compiling her casualty list, Folsom said visitors from chillier climes might not even realize the extent of the horticultural tragedy.
“A visitor who has never been here wouldn’t notice a great deal of damage, but the trained eye is hypersensitive,” she said. “Remember, though, people coming here from another climate say it still looks pretty good.”
John Rodman, director of Pitzer College’s arboretum in Claremont, was philosophical about the big chill: “Nature giveth. Nature taketh.”
