This is why I zone-push in the opposite direction. Everything growing on my property is hardy to zone 4, but I select varieties that are zone 3 hardy whenever possible.

Snow is a great insulator however, and your plants are more likely to be damaged by slightly warmer cold temperatures with no snow cover than by extreme cold temps with lots of snow.

Yeah, I hear ya spedigrees z4VT! I did practise common sense and have many Canadian Explorer Roses - like William Baffin. He does get huge, my Billy boy. No weather stops him. He'll be here after the apocalypse. For those who haven't heard of them, here is a list. If you're in MA, you might as well indulge. http://www3.sympatico.ca/galetta/tables/explorerroses.html

If you're in MA, you have snow then, right? Don't despair yet! I'm techinically zone 6. Barely. Literally, barely. One mile away, maybe less, it is zone 5. I'm truly borderline! I planted a zone 6-er this summer, and I haven't lost hope yet. So much wonderful snow on the ground still, so I'm sleeping well.

By the way, had some furnace people out today. They were reminiscing about the winter of ?2003? where we had cold like this with no snow. It was so bad some leach fields actually froze solid, which meant no more leaching water from the septic until they thawed. Now, that's miserable. Yea yea yea yea yea snow snow snow snow!

Whenever people start complaining about the cold, I just start thinking about the winters in the early '90's when we first moved here. There were several winters with thermometer temperatures about 15 degrees below the worst I've seen forecast this year. If you look up the entry for Viburnum plicatum in the 5th edition of Dirr, he talks a bit about what happens when zone 5 sees borderline zone 3 temperatures. This weather is kid's stuff, and barely worth mentioning.

The last time we were below -10, we went outside and blew some bubbles. At those temperatures, the bubble freeze, and are really, really cool.

Mad_gallica, I recently saw photos of frozen bubbles with a series of photos taken as they froze and the frost patterns developed. If you mix your own bubble mix and add some corn syrup, supposedly they are less likely to pop. Something on my to-do list this winter.

We get below -20 here every 2-5 years, and below -15 pretty much every year. I have 3 different V. plicatum. I know one is Popcorn which Dirr says is hardy to -23, but the other two came unlabeled. All three have survived our coldest temperatures to bloom well, and I wonder if being under trees helps shelter them a bit. My in-the-trees Kousa dogwood did fine the same winter that the one planted in the field had damage, but whether that was exposure or different genetics I have no way of knowing. Both were unlabeled as to cultivar, so they may be seed grown.

Hmmm.... I don't remember these ferociously cold temperatures from years before- maybe I just blocked it out. Maybe for a day or two, but not sustained for 2-3 weeks. I have horses so I'm typically acutely aware of the weather conditions.

I'm glad I finally got winter protection on my Hydrangea, but honestly I'm more concerned about fruit growers. Peaches, apricots, plums, pluots, etc. are not made for this. At least it is early in the season- last time we had weather this cold it was only for a day or two and it was late enough in the season that peach trees already had buds and there were no peaches in MA that year.

I think it was 1994, but since I have yet to figure out a good way to get into old weather records, I don't know. There were a lot of cold winters in the early 90's. If it didn't go below -15, it was officially a 'warm' winter. The worst was a low of -30.

The reality is that when you have spent several days barely breaking zero for a daily high, the current double-digit temperatures feel positively balmy.

NHBabs, does the corn syrup stop them from popping when they hit something? Though there was a neat little shattering sound when they hit the driveway. And yes, doublefile viburnums do not like -30.

I agree Ruth, that this winter has seen the most relentless stretch of cold temperatures that I ever remember, going back all the way to the early 1970's. Like NHBabs said, we get annual winter temperatures of -15, -20, and occasionally lower (and I think I'm a zone colder than she is) but I do not ever remember the extreme cold holding on this long. A year or so ago we had what they called a "polar vortex" stalled out over us, but my memory is that it dispersed sooner. (We had horses too for many years, and if we'd had sustained cold like this, we probably would have been hauling water from the house out to them everyday as I suspect our little brook is now frozen almost solid to the bottom. Fortunately our equines lived their lives in a better time weatherwise!)

Tomorrow temperatures are predicted to rise into the 30s, and it will feel like the tropics! I'm keeping a good thought for everyone's fragile trees and plants.

NH babs I’m so glad to hear that windchill won’t affect most of the plants under the snow! I had no idea windchill only applied to warm things - yay!

"I have yet to figure out a good way to get into old weather records"

Mad Gallica, I just happened across Wunderground's historical records. The link is for my closest National Weather Station, but you can change it to your local station.
Weather history by day, week or month

I only just got some karo syrup, so I will need to mix up my bubble recipe today in preparation for today's plunging temperatures to play with frozen bubbles. Yesterday's high was 57; by dawn tomorrow we expect to be slightly below zero.

We don't seem to have a National Weather Station. I'd like to find the records for the Kingston Airport, but those don't seem to exist online. Wunderground keeps trying to redirect me to the Poughkeepsie Airport, which is about a zone south of here. Personal weather stations tend to be more useful, but they don't tend to have long histories.

I have to take the Concord airport's numbers with a grain of salt since it is several hundred feet higher and in a city, unlike where I am in a rural valley about 15 miles north and in an area colder than surroundings by about half a zone. But it does usually reflect general trends in temperature and snowfall, though our rain is often quite different.

Glad to hear anything under a snow blanket is safe from wind chills of 20-30 below. Makes good sense. I was worried about my magnolia tree and my viburnum placatum Marieisii, but nuthin we can do, so might as well forget about it and take a 'wait and see' attitude. Loved hearing everyone's comments especially the one 'this weather is kid's stuff'.... Heading to Florida for the rest of the winter. See ya later alligator! :-)

When the warm rains came this week, all our snow (or nearly all) disappeared. I was AMAZED at how good the plants under the snow looked. For two examples, my Iberia sempervirens STILL had buds, and the Huecheras looked great. Even though I knew the snow was insulating protection, I didn't expect things to look that good. We really didn't have much of a killing frost before all the snow came in December. But, now the snow is gone and it got into, or at least near, the single digits last night. I can already tell a big difference in the plants. They wish they had some snow. I also wish the soil had not gotten completely saturated with water before dropping from 50 degrees to about 10 degrees in twelve hours yesterday. I believe my soil drains well, but we had a deluge of water before the temperature plummeted.

Is it normal for the temperatures to zig zag so much? Hard freeze after temperatures of 50f must be very taxing for plants.

I think a January thaw is typical but I didn't hear last week's warm temps called that. Snow is "poor man's insulation". My husband said the driveway is frozen but he plowed around our new garage and said the ground under the snow isn't frozen. I can remember a spring so late that a neighbor shoveled a garden bed because her spring bulbs were ready to come up. I will never forget a February Saturday when we were up in Sandwich NH and it was slightly over 60 degrees in the morning. We were at a sled dog race so the veterinarians were concerned about the health risk running dogs when it was that warm. There was a vet at every check point and a mandatory rest break was required. There was a thunderstorm and the temperature plummeted to 20 degrees by late afternoon/early evening.