DON'T DO ANYTHING AT ALL

Dismal, isn't it? The after effects of this late freeze. Yes, I'm far luckier than the gentleman in Georgia interviewed on NPR, who's lost his entire fruit crop--peaches, pecans, blueberries. Still--it doesn't look like it will be a stellar year in my garden.

As so often, I turn to Henry Mitchell for advice and consolation:

"What then, when some crisis arises, such as the tulips sprouting too early or the peonies too late or the camellias faced with a freeze?

One of the few ways I could really be helpful to any gardener is precisely at this point, because this is something I know with every atom of bone and blood:

DON'T DO ANYTHING AT ALL

At least give nature a chance, give the plant a fighting chance to survive.... [T]hey have great powers of survival if let alone; but no plant has a chance if the one wrong and disastrous thing is done, and that wrong way is invariably the way we gardeners choose.

...If a shrub is frozen to the ground, it may be several months before a new shoot emerges--time after time after time the gardener (who knows all that) starts digging just two weeks short of the plant's recovery, and the plant dies (it will often make only the one effort) when it would have lived if left strictly alone." (Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman, pp. 139-40)

Therefore I will not rush out to replace the roses and clematis and bleeding heart and brunera and all the other plants that look so entirely incontrovertably dead. I will wait until next spring and hope for better things.

(Hosta buds, undamaged)