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Serissa in winter -- something new
Like most of us, I think, I've treated serissas as tropical trees. This included keeping them indoors and warm during our winters.
Recently, Carl Rosner and Jerry Meislik challenged my ideas about this species, and challenged them seriously. Jerry said that in his observation, serissa do best with a winter "cool-down:" 6-8 weeks with temperatures in the range of 35-45 F (approx. 2-7 C.) Carl reports that he routinely buries his serissas to the pot rims in his garden each winter, and mulches them. He lives in southern New Jersey, USA, where he occasionally gets winter lows in the single digits F. His serissas, he says, thrive with this treatment, and "bloom like crazy" in the spring.
After some thought, I decided to overwinter my serissa with my JBP and trident maples, in a back room where they will all be kept cold but not bear the full brunt of our Zone 5b winter. (JBP and tridents are not fully hardy here when in a pot.)
The die was cast last nite. The low was supposed to be about 32 F (0 C), and I left the serissa on the deck when I brought my tropicals inside. This morning there was frost on the cars, and a tray of rainwater had a thin skin of ice on it.
The serissa was on the lower level of a plastic shelf (orange arrow in picture,) and about a meter from the outer wall of our bedroom. Both those factors would ameliorate the cold a little, but only a little.
We'll see how the new approach works. I do have one other serissa, a rooted cutting I took from this tree a few months ago. That will stay with my tropicals this winter, sort of as a back-up if anything goes wrong!
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Treebeard 55
Steve Moore
http://hoosierbonsai.blogspot.com
The most important bonsai tool is your brain.
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