Last Best News - Billings Montana ,June 2015
Winter burn on trees, shrubs is the worst in decades
Everywhere you go in Billings, the effects of last November’s harsh temperatures are starkly apparent.
Two of the most common trees and shrubs—junipers and arborvitae—were hit hard by the early freeze, leaving thousands of the plants with brown, dead-looking foliage.
But it turns out the damage is much worse than you might think. Amy Grandpre, the horticulture assistant with the Yellowstone County Extension Service, said numerous other species of trees and shrubs were hammered as well, including fruit trees, elm trees and burning bushes, the ones that display bright crimson leaves.
“It’s kind of escalating,” she said. “First it was evergreens and now it’s all kinds of things.” Grandpre said the damage inflicted this winter was the worst she’d seen in her 35 years with the extension service.
Richard Marble, the owner of Billings Nursery and Landscaping, said he’s witnessed nothing like it in his nearly 45 years in the business.
“This is by far the worst I’ve seen it,” he said. “This is across the board. It hit everything.”
Many of the evergreens suffered only winter burn, not winter kill, Marble and Grandpre said, and they will come back in time. But as Marble said, “they’re just going to look really rough for a long time.”
The damage occurred last November, which started out unseasonably warm and then grew bitterly cold in a big hurry. According to the National Weather Service, the high in Billings on Nov. 8 was 69. By Nov. 11 it had plunged to 1 below zero, then 4 below on Nov. 12 and 8 below on Nov. 13.
Compounding the damage, it warmed up again, hitting 61 degrees by Nov. 28 before dropping to 4 below on Nov. 29 and 8 below on Nov. 30. Elsewhere in Montana, temperatures of 20 below were not uncommon in November.
Because the trees were still actively growing and were not yet dormant when the temperatures plunged, the cold, snow and wind all conspired to burn the foliage.
http://lastbestnews.com/site/2015/06/winter-burn-on-trees-shrubs-is-the-worst-in-decades/