Know your Hardiness Zone
When people want to create a more contemporary planting design for a yard, they will need to use perennials and grasses that come back year after year. This means you need to pick the right species for the job. Only when you use the correct plants for your hardiness zone will you see them come back once the snow melts. Plants didn’t evolve to simply die in the fall and never return. Their primal desire is to live and multiply. When you pick flowers and grasses ideal for your climate, you will be participating in helping fulfill a deep-rooted instinct. It will also save you tons of money in the long run.
A plant’s hardiness zone is defined as the amount of cold it can take before it freezes to death. It’s ability to survive blistering winters is directly connected to where and when it evolved. Tomatoes, for example, are native to Central America and can’t get through even the mildest winter in the US. So you have to plant them over and over each year. But, go to where they are native, and they don’t need to be started from seed annually. Likewise, Echinacea purpurea (coneflower) evolved in eastern North American with a hardiness zone range of 3 to 8. They can take lots of cold and relatively lots of hot. They will find it difficult to grow where tomatoes flourish as well as in the northern parts of Canada.
A hardiness zone map is easy to find. The one below is from the USDA and break each zone into two parts: an “a” and “b”.
This lettering indicates that one part of the zone is colder than the other. The “a” is always the colder of the two. Each zone is based on historical data for how cold an area gets. So a zone 6 means that area could likely see low temperatures from 0 to -10 while a zone 10 will like see lows from 30 to 40 degrees. A Zone 6 is situated through most of northern New Jersey, Ohio and southern Illinois while a zone 10 is found in Texas, Florida and Louisiana.
Hardiness zones were first created for cultivating trees and shrubs during the first half of the 20th century. In the 1990s, the USDA began to publish the “official” maps. This makes sense because most vegetables are planted and harvested within the same year while fruit and nut trees need to stay around to mature. That’s why oranges are grown in warm climates and apples are grown in colder climates.
The more you fall in love with gardening and landscape design, the more you’ll have to learn. Start by figuring which hardiness zone you live in since this information is fundamental for a successful garden.