I was sent seeds for a white orchid tree (Bauhinia) and I am upset that I cant grow it here! I live in a northern suburb of chicago and I would LOVE to grow it, but I am afraid it wont survive my winters!!! Its such a beautiful plant, I would hate to have to get rid of the seeds!
Any Suggestions???
White Orchid Tree in ILLINOIS!
You can grow it in a pot and bring it in for the winter--things in containers tend to grow slower than they would if they were in the ground so hopefully you can enjoy it for a number of years before it gets too big to lug it in for the winter every year. Outdoors unfortunately it's so far from being hardy in your zone that there's really nothing you could do that would protect it enough.
ok I will have to try that then, thanks for the advice.
When they get bigger, you can put your flower pot on one of those rolling castor and roll them in...
I have several tropicals that I do this with, including my Brugs. However, I over winter them in the garage, and let them go dormant... with just enough water to keep them alive. I wheel them out in the spring and all is well. Well... most of the time. lol I have to remind family members NOT to go in and out of the garage on days / nights when the temps dip below 35. I lost almost everything 2 winters ago when someone left the garage door open on a night when it dipped to 22 degrees. I believe the cat ran in and sent the descending door back up. Little snot... gotta love him.
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Your brugs should be hardy enough to plant in the ground in Chattanooga. I gave my parents some cuttings of mine and they live 80 miles north of Chattanooga. Theirs has been in the ground for years.
What kind of brugs are those? Out here we had a bad winter 2 yrs ago where we had a week of nighttime lows in the low 20's and lots of people had theirs die from that, so at least for the ones I'm familiar with I'd be shocked if they could survive in TN.
I don't remember the names - I got two of them from White Flower Farms years ago. I think one was Charles Grimaldi and the other one was Pink something or the other. Check out Plant Delights Nursery for some hardy brugs and Tony Avent's take on why some plants fare better here than in CA. when it comes to hardiness.
http://www.plantdelights.com/Catalog/Current/page18.html
I wanted to add "Be shocked - the brugs in my parents yard have been there for years and grow 5 foot or more and bloom very nicely each and every year". There are some yards in N. GA. that have oodles of brugs in the ground that put on amazing shows (although one or two brugs is usually plenty for most folks).
This message was edited Oct 8, 2008 4:09 PM
I'm aware of why things often seem to be less hardy here, we don't get below freezing very often which puts us in zone 9, but we get very close to it on many more nights than the FL and TX versions of zone 9, so the higher total number of hours at cold temperatures makes some zone 9 plants unhappy (and that's also why I typically use Sunset's zones rather than the USDA's when figuring out what might do well here). Brugs typically do OK here though, it seemed to be that one week with nighttime lows in the low 20's that caused a lot of problems for them, and I assumed TN would have at least one period like that (if not worse) every winter which is why I was surprised that brugs would overwinter there. But since the ones that died out here during our cold snap weren't my plants I have no idea what cultivar they were so they might not have been the hardier ones (although Charles Grimaldi is a very popular one here)
We get into the teens at times, and the 20's a lot in N. GA. We rarely get in the single digits.
In middle TN, teens are common, single digits often, and below zero is more a rarity than it used to be 30 years ago.
A lot of people that grow brugs here put them close to the house perhaps for a little more protection but I've never done that. In spring I cut the old stalks to the ground and rake out any leaves that have gathered around the previous year's stalks and wait for the show to begin.
Here is my Charles G. at my last house. It has a ways to go before it gets that big again at our new house but it has had several blooms this year and is about 4 feet tall. Maybe if I fertilized it and watered it then it might put more size on.
When I lived in Dallas we had Brugs out side all the time in the ground. Zone 8a - there was always folks in the South of Texas that could not believe they would live and take it. I think that the mulch layer protected them and the fact that we got cold and started there for most of the winter, it is the cold and warm and then cold that does things in really fast. My two cents at least - I dont know how or why but they worked...