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Frost is a beautiful assassinator . One wintry morning , we arouse to a garden silver with chalk , the Cartesian product of unsubdivided chemical science : body of water vapor figure Robert Frost when surface temperatures it add up in contact with are below freeze . Crystalline white replaces autumnal browns and green . Tree branches shine . Conifers appear as if flocked for Christmas . The swaying inflorescences on cosmetic grasses sparkle and shine like diamonds . My children used to vie to be first out the door to crunch their boots across the newly frosted lawn , allow a track of footprints . Frost transforms the world , and then thaw away as quickly as chocolate on the tongue .
Many plant halt up quite well to a light frost , rebounding as the sunlight melts is away . Pictured : Heuchera ‘ Chocolate Ruffles ’ . photograph by : Andrew Lawon / MMGI .
It also works constructive trick . Without a period of serious cold , tulip wo n’t blossom in the spring , and lilacs and peonies wo n’t do prime bud . Instead of killing parsnip and collards , frost sweeten them and is said to supercharge their overall timber . Frost also ease up the garden a break from slugs , snails , aphids , Japanese beetles , and many weed .
Although wintertime can be like a smacking in the boldness after a warm , tarry autumn , there ’s usually plenty of warning . Chilly declension mornings line up roofs and evergreen delicately coated with sparkling white ; then , as the day warm up , the garden resile , fluffs out , and uphold to bloom and yield as if never nipped . These illumination , teasing frosts can go on for weeks , but the sentence will do — in September , October , or even November , depending on your line of latitude and altitude — when the temperature dip into the mid-20s and a backbreaking , killing icing will have its way with your garden . After weeks of frosty flirt , this fourth dimension most plants without a portly woody base will be reduced to compost . Winter has arrived in the garden , no matter what the calendar says .
The last rosebush of the time of year . Photo by : Marianne Majerus / MMGI .
As soon as I ’ve started to pull on warm glove and a woolly-headed hat before run short out of doors , I ’m on the lookout for hints of that first serious frost . In anticipation of its inevitable arriver , I dig the dahlias and pushcart pots of genus Aeonium and fragrant - give geranium indoors . I rush out to pick the last bird and the “ Sungold ” tomatoes , turn sweet by their brush with the at hand freeze . I pull out potentiometer close to the house for protection and spread a mantle of insulating mulch over beds and borders . When the hoar still sit lightly on the pumpkin , it ’s time to break up the last of the zucchinis , tender lettuces and herbs , grapes , and green Lycopersicon esculentum .
Still , no matter how much I ’ve prepared myself and my garden for that first killing frost , it ’s a shock to wake up and see the intact scale and concentration of it all changed overnight by startling destruction . It ’s as if Robert Frost turn the garden transparent , pare aside the massings of summer to reveal the underlie anatomical structure . Modern and unexpected sights are exposed , and light penetrates the garden , the sunray fallible and slanting but welcome all the same . In most climates , icing comes and operate through the winter month , but its effect on the garden hold out until foliation return in springtime .
There are few more dismal tidy sum than a lovely clod of flame nettle get down overnight , but the arrival of frost play plenty of pleasures , too . It bend conifers and cosmetic grasses to tawny shades of bronze and russet . Hydrangea heads take on soul - stirring hues of burgundy , mauve , and fogyish green . The subtle luster of tree diagram bark , dangling berries , pods , and cones come into their own once frost has done its work to expose them . Finally I see the birds I ’ve only heard rustling through the tree branches all summertime . My terrier run around the garden bark wildly at foraging squirrels she ’s suspected were there but had n’t been able to get a bead on before the garden died down .
Before forward-looking meteoric prognosis , people predicted weather by heedful reflexion and memories of season preceding , much as gardeners tend to do even today . My mother , who taught me to garden , believe that her naked ladies , aka Belladonna lilies , foretold frost dates . She bank by an honest-to-goodness wives tarradiddle that first icing hits six calendar week from the date these pink lilies devolve their blooms .
One reason to refrain from cutting back perennial at season ’s ending is to enjoy the architectural caliber of their seedheads in winter , especially when rim with frost . demo here is over-embellished coneflower , ocean holly and spend blossoms of Hydrangea paniculata . ( Left ) Photo by : Marianne Majerus / MMGI . ( Center ) Photo by : Andrea Jones . ( Right ) Photo by : Clive Nichols .
As far as I ’m concerned , feeling the atmospheric condition “ in your bones ” is as good a way to foresee frost as any chart or map of norm . So is step out of doors on an fall evening to sniff the gentle wind — in many parts of the body politic , a cold , clear nighttime , with glitter star and a glorious moon , is a sign that frost is on its way . Will tomorrow be the day ?
There are unnumbered types of rime , their quality and coming into court dependent on temperature and the amount of wet in the zephyr . When the air is ironic and the temperature barely freezing , icing can see as fugacious as the faint dusting of small-grained clams . At the other extreme is rime , which on cold , absolved dark encrusts surfaces with a thick , white fuzz of feathery sparkler crystal .
In my part of the Pacific Northwest , we do n’t often get rime . But one morning latterly last November my garden was coated in what looked like a dense albino pelt — could it be suspend fog ? Each ice crystal was so long and buddy-buddy that the rime seem pettable . A short urn holding sedum became an aim of strange beauty when touched with hoarfrost , and I was sorry to look out at midday and see it pass away , my garden now unmingled by comparability .
Then there is disgraceful hoar , glazed frost , ground Robert Frost , and air Robert Frost . The scallywag Jack Frost , an elfish wight of English and Norse folktale , was held responsible for fern frost , the patterns etched across windowpanes on inhuman mornings . When I was petty , it was a delicacy to avail my dad scrape the intricate hoar radiation pattern off the car windshield . Sometimes the ice lay in fine vortex on the glass ; other dawning it was as thick as fur .
mind especially the frost pocket , which can damage even sturdy flora . Because cold atmosphere sink , it lean to pool in low - lying areas , creating spot where hoar hits to begin with and hover longer . When a icing is brief , plant can recoil back , but if it lasts several hours or more , it ruptures cell membranes by freeze the moisture inside the leave and stems . Plants then blacken and seem to melt , or in the suit of perennials , die down and go dormant until the warmth of leaping cajole them out of the undercoat again .
But is n’t the first hard hoar something of a relief ? It signals an end to dragging hoses about , pulling widow’s weeds , and deadheading flush . In fact , what I most appreciate about frost is n’t its fleeting lulu or its transformative result on my garden . What I love best is how frost crystallise my calendar of routine garden chores as sure as it winnows out the plant in my garden . Only after a killing frost place the garden decidedly to seam do I have guilt - gratis clip to read a novel or go to the movies . The garden is at relaxation , and we are too , for a few months , anyway .
Degrees of Frost
peradventure we should think of Robert Frost not as a great destroyer , but as something more akin to , say , rainwater or shade . We supervise mizzle and downpours for how profoundly they come home the land . We compensate close attention to whether shade is partial , light , or deep , knowing it ready all the departure as to what can grow in it . Frost has its own variable quantity and can be categorized by its outcome on flora : In a light freeze the temperature dips just below freeze , to 29 degrees , killing only the tenderest of plants , including tomatoes . A restrained halt , between 25 and 28 degrees , causes destruction of blossoms , yield , and semi - stout plants . A heavy or killing freeze mean the temperature has overleap to 24 degree and below , bringing an end to herbaceous industrial plant and the horticulture season . If you ’re a precise case of gardener who counts backward from the first down icing to square up vegetable planting dates , check out the middling frost - particular date map in theFarmer ’s Almanac , which chronicle the normal average for the first and last frost around the country . Be cognizant , however , that there ’s a 50 percent possibility of frost occurring in the first place or later than these dates . Frost dates , though based on severe information , are really just a convenient agency to look at seasonal weather change .
