Plant With Nine Lives

Perhaps the only way I have continued growing plants for 35 years, indoors and out, is thanks to the hardiness, toughness, and "will to live" that so many plants exhibit.  I'm a gardener who is very good at neglect and destruction.  This week's example: Crape Myrtle, Lagerstroemia indica. To me this is a very desirable plant: I've never seen it growing in Canada.  I got this little slip of a thing in 2011 from the Honey Tree Nursery in PEI - an amazing resource for unusual trees and shrubs here in the Maritimes.

One of my first blog posts, last spring, was about this little twig coming out of dormancy.  Who knows how hardy it might be in our Nova Scotian winters?  I keep it indoors in a cool place.  Last summer it leafed and branched out nicely.  It had managed to survive the winter in a closed-up bedroom.  As the azalea with it indicates, it dried out too much.  The Azalea died, the Crape Myrtle survived.  I'm a chronic under-waterer of plants.

This winter I housed it in a cold front porch.  I was hoping for a cooler and longer dormancy, and it fared very well.  I found it all leafed out a week ago, and decided to take it out the the unheated greenhouse.  

  Well, it's mid-April in Nova Scotia, and we had a night of -5 degrees Celsius.   Yeah, naturally, the fresh little leaves froze quite solidly.

Here it is.  But notice that one single branch did not freeze like the rest.  And that one stem has kept its leaves, while all the others rolled up and got crispy.  Funny phenomenon.  I've seen this before, with a tray of tender plants that I've left in the greenhouse in the fall.  One night, ninety percent of the succulent leaves froze to death, but the occasional rosette did not, and lived to die another day, with the onset of icy temperatures.  I must investigate this scientific curiosity.

With hopes that the budding twigs of my Crape Myrtle will come back from the grave, I rubbed off all the dead, dried leaves.  Here's hoping this little fellow will flourish again.  Perhaps, one year soon, there will actually be blossoms in the late summer.  And maybe, just maybe, I will venture to plant it out in the ground in a protected spot, and discover if it will live through our winters.  It has only used up about three of its nine lives so far, I'm guessing.