Gardening Experts Offer Advice About Recovering From ‘Winter Burn’

Sales have been brisk at Wisconsin garden centers as homeowners look to replace shrubs and trees that were damaged by a long, cold winter. But experts say before people dig those plants up, they might want to take a closer look.

Wisconsinites don’t have to wander far to find a brown, dead-looking yew or arborvitae — they’re everywhere.

This winter was especially hard on evergreens, said Lisa Johnson, a horticulture educator with University of Wisconsin-Extension in Dane County. She calls it “winter burn.”

“What happens is that evergreens don’t go into dormancy as deeply as do deciduous trees that lose their leaves. So, because they’re not completely dormant, every time we start to go above freezing they start to give off water,” Johnson said.

Johnson said evergreens become dehydrated because they can’t replace that lost water when the ground is frozen. She said the problems were compounded this winter because of a dry fall and the lingering effects of the drought in 2012.

Both Johnson and Scott Stoddard, nursery manager at Jungs Garden Center in Madison, said it might be a little too soon to give up on evergreens and deciduous bushes and trees.

“Because of the cold soil temperatures, even at this point some of the trees that were struggling to wake up or are still struggling, but they’re showing signs of life. We have people scratch the bark to see if there still green underneath. If it is still green, it has a good chance of coming back,” Stoddard said.

For evergreens, Johnson advises looking deep within the bush or tree in the coming weeks for dormant buds. However, she said that evergreen bushes that were manicured or aggressively pruned might have an especially hard time recovering.