59-68 degree temps,free-draining soil.Side shoots of green wood root well.Rooting takes 6-10 weeks.Green wood cuttings in summer.Hard wood in the winter is easier.Seeds in spring.This an ever green and I dont know if you could lift it and store it with no water.You could put chicken wire around the plant and stuff it with straw.If you still need some help cover that with a frost blanket

I have several which have wintered over when mulched heavily, but they are short and are only beginning to bloom now; I wouldn't bank on their hardiness in a hard winter. Cuttings are easy (they'll even root in water, if you like), and I take a few for insurance every year. I keep one second year plant (grown as a standard) in the garage every year, since I find it takes two years for these to fill out and look good. It's in a big pot which gets watered about once a month. The garage doesn't freeze, but the plant gets some light through the small windows and from the fluorescent lights under which I start seeds and grow small things all winter. I've been potting on its 2010 replacement (which is one of the cuttings I rooted last fall), and that'll be trained to a stake in the greenhouse this winter (it's in a one-gallon pot right now). The one I carry over this winter will be trashed around Thanksgiving of 2009...talk about a production! Sorry if this is too much info... I get carried away.

All that having been said, you probably could store the roots in a cool cellar without light, provided they didn't get too wet or too dry...I'd carry over some cuttings, too.

No such as too much information, if you ask me! Thanks, guys. This is great information and I will be taking cuttings this week. I can always mulch them well and take my chances on the ones in the ground. If they make it through, as you said, bubba, I have back-ups.

Your information raises one more question. Do you cut the ones you leave in the ground back in the fall? I did that last year, assuming they would die anyway. It took them until Labor Day to bloom, which was alot later than they took the year before. Am I correct in assuming it was due to the pollarding?

I didn't cut mine back (too lazy for that - frankly, I forgot they were there...), and they were still really late in blooming. Even the ones I carried over inside were late this year, so who knows why? My guess is that they'd die back to the ground here even in a mild winter, anyway, so cutting them back shouldn't make a difference in terms of bloom time. Not sure whether that might affect hardiness or not (as with Salvias); it might be safer to just leave the stems standing, if you're concerned about wintering them over outside.

It really does help to compare notes, doesn't it? Thanks for the feedback, bubba.

Live and learn... in listening to a recent Felder Rushing podcast, I learned that Tibouchinas bloom in response to shortening day lengths, which makes perfect sense, considering they come from close to the equator, where the days are shorter throughout the summer than they are here. And since our summer days in VA are a bit longer than yours in MS, DonnaB, I'd assume you'd get blooms even before I would. This, of course, doesn't explain the huge, profusely blooming Tibouchina standards I've seen at Longwood Gardens in July and August; presumably their days are longer in summer than ours are, but they also have tons of capital, labor, and horticultural magic to invest in bringing something like that about.

So interesting! That certainly does go along with its habit here. Thanks for passing it along, bubba.