The MGS Forum
Our gardens, a month-by-month pictorial diary of what's looking good now => Our Gardens => Topic started by: John J on January 07, 2015, 12:52:50 PM
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Following 3 to 4 days of torrential rain and extremely high winds a couple of trees in our daughter's garden ended up looking like this.
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Is she going to try to resurrect them to their former upright position?
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We're going to try, Trevor. We're looking at different methods of staking them to see which might be the best to prevent it happening again in the future.
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Working in freezing rain this morning to pull the trees back upright.
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We awoke this morning to find the following in our garden. Not a victim of the dreaded beetle this time but of the recent high winds, the ones last night obviously proving to be the last straw. The prevailing winds here blow from the south-west and the trees are used to that but last night they switched and came in from the east thus taking the palm by surprise I guess.
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Very unusual to see a Phoenix spp palm snap in a high wind storm here in California, I don't think I've ever seen this happen here. It sounds like palms in general are really under seige in southern Europe from the introduced beetles and moths over there. I doubt I'd persist with using them in new gardens given how widespread these pests are in the Mediterranean basin.
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Commiserations John on the latest wind damage - your early morning walk in the garden must be turning into something of a nightmare instead of a pleasant start to the day. :'(
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That is awful John. I would like to add my commiserations to Umbrian's.
We have had really strong winds here on Crete too....along with hail, snow, thunder and lightning, power outages and earthquakes. I am expecting a plague of locusts next. ::)
In spite of the really strong winds coming from all directions, there has been very little damage. Every morning, I go out expecting that my precocious tulip flowers have been snapped off, but so far, they are hanging on to them.
Daisy :)
(https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7498/16290147441_2c55dee5fc_c.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/qPvgi4)jan 2015 002 (https://flic.kr/p/qPvgi4) by Daisyincrete (https://www.flickr.com/people/93752583@N02/), on Flickr
(https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7487/15672057333_3d9a731530_c.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/pSToD4)jan 2015 003 (https://flic.kr/p/pSToD4) by Daisyincrete (https://www.flickr.com/people/93752583@N02/), on Flickr
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There is a lovely compact blue palm from Morocco. It is low growing and clumping with age so may not be a suitable replacement in the position you have. how about the native Theophrastus palm?
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Hi Trevor, thank you for your thoughtful suggestion. The top of the palm tree has been brought down this morning by 3workers luckily with little damage to the succulents. The tree has a lot of side shoots lower down and I hope it will grow again to hide the ugly top. To be honest I don't think palms are suitable trees for our garden. We had them because they were both presents. This last one was given to me by my late brother's friend . It was only a seedling brought from Israel. It was there for aprox. 25 years.Now we have 2 Wounded trees next to each other and an Araucaria that had its growing point broken off and it is growing at a slant. The Melia tree which I really love, was broken in a storm a few years ago. We have to think how to improve the aesthetic look of that side garden.
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Thanks for the commiserations, Carole and Daisy. My early morning walks can be a bit depressing when greeted by sights like this Brugmansiathat caught the full force of the cold winds. However it isn't all bad as our Solandra has taken everything the weather could throw at it, high winds (some bitingly cold), torrential rain, etc, without flinching. It has continued to flower profusely through it all.
Purely out of interest I counted the plants that were in flower at the moment (admittedly some only sparsely) and came up with over 50 varieties so, as I said, it isn't all bad news.