Dear All, Here in northern Germany where I live and garden we have had a sucession of mild winters and people (including myself) started to grow plants like rosemary and the hardier palms in their gardens. Everybody seems to believe in climate change in the sense of climate warming and even exaggerated versions of us becoming banana producers circulated, not very seriously, though. Myself I also planted some exotics. All the previous winters I took safety cuttings or dug up a small piece of a plant to secure it under glass, except this winter...... and.... well, yes, it is one of the coldest winter recorded in Germany. It is not so much the coldness as such but the length of it that seems to be destructive. And I am still lucky. With me the lowest teperature was about -15 to-16°C but a few kilometres away it dropped well below -20°C. There is a bed of exotics covered with cold-frame windows. There are the hardy agapanthus, Tulbaghia violacea, Ismene, Albuca shawii and other Albucas, Kniphofia, Oxalis, Mirabils and Mexican Salvias in it...... may be I should say were in it? As everything is frozen, I assume the damage will only become apparent later in spring. Some plants such as Camellias and a Trachycarpus palm (all very borderline here) look surprisingly good but are they perhapy freeze-dried and will collapse on thawing? The only flowers I have in spite of the cold weather is a wonderful specimen of Hamamelis "Pallida" but it is too cold to detect its delicious scent. it is underplanted with Cyclamen coum but barely any flowers visible, even the Snowdrops are still invisible! Lucky you Californians with wet frost free winters! So what to conclude? It is of course not justified to deduct too much from a single event. Here in Germany the statistics show that spring flowers are about two weeks earlier nowadays than they used to be maybe fifty years ago. It may also show us why garden plants are garden plants and not wild plants.... they need human interference to survive outside their native climate...... even this is not guaranteed. Here in Europe it looks as if the weather becomes more extreme, more storms (we did not have hurricanes until recently) more extreme rain, more summer heat, longer dry spells and maybe longer and colder cold spells? Attention to this is certainly necessary. All the best and bye for today, Uli