I’m betting it will come back. The sunnier the location, the faster. I have some leafing out already, but some others (shadier location)not yet. I will say a newly planted, young one might not return.

I live in zone 7b (GA) and plant lantana every year. To my knowledge, it's not frost tolerant. I think it will only survive if you bring it indoors during the winter. Mine have never come back. If you know otherwise, please let me know how. Thanks!

Most lantana are not frost tolerant. But Miss Huff Lantana is supposed to be the exception.

In my climate, it will begin to regrow once it is replanted :-) Lantana just will not overwinter here, regardless of how hardy it is supposed to be.

i understand gal ... but for her to find out.. rather than just cut bait .... she needs to wait until the soil warms ...

ken

crock--- I'm in zone 7b and Miss Huff has wintered over no problem; its a fast grower that gets really big in a season. You are not supposed to trim them back too low in fall, let the stems stay on the plant and trim back in spring, otherwise they can die of root rot because they have hollow stems where water gets in.

I've got some kind of orange one that is a low growing, wide spreader about 2.2 ft tall and 5 feet wide, its always the first to leaf out once the weather warms, usually quite early in spring, its a Texas type but not 'horrida' because it blooms all summer and prolifically. Miss Huff leafs out a lot later. Those common yellow ground cover kinds that you see in the nurseries also winter over successfully, I've had the same plants for years. Lantana 'horrida' (Texas native) is very hardy and so is L, camara (not native), both of these are unimproved wild types that spend energy to produce a lot of seeds so they don't bloom as often. My grandmother had a L. camera for decades, the same plant in the same spot in zone 7a. I have one that I started from a cutting and I'm pretty sure its 'Carnival'. Its very hardy too. Most of mine were started from cuttings I got here locally of known survivors, the stems root real easy.

The bedding kinds are not hardy. I don't waste money on those, besides, I don't much like them because they look sissy.

I wouldn't call it quits for a couple more months at least.

Not all plants will perform the same way in all zone 7 gardens!! As I stated, no lantana will overwinter in my garden and I have not seen anything close to zone 7 winter temps in years. OTOH, zonal geraniums will often winter over....I have four still cooking along right now.........

I don't know where crock lives but I assure you the winter hardy types do fine in Oklahoma's zone 7a and 7b. They've gone through subzero, flood, drought, snow, thick ice etc in Oklahoma. Miss Huff is reliable in zone 7.

Anyway, it makes no difference, the plant in question has been in the ground all winter and it either made it or not, time will tell.

Yeah, I have had lantana in 6b/7a and had the same experiences as TR2 above. They don't leaf out early...you pretty much know danger of frost is past when they do...but they grow very fast.

Hello Barron! Long time no talk.

GG---Maybe they don't appreciate the milder climate & amount of moisture in the PNW? It is a plant native to Texas and Mexico where the climate is very different. The biggest asset of lantana is its ability to laugh at hot sun and our long, intense summers often with consecutive days of 100+ degree heat along with regular extended droughts and remain unflapped, blooming their heads off. without irrigation. Seems the hotter it gets, the better they like it. The same is true for Crepe Myrtle, both are commonly planted all over the place down here, both the hardy kinds and the smaller bedding type greenhouse kinds for that reason--low maintenance, no care plants.

8b Central Texas here. I have some horridas that I planted last year and they are just today (Saturday) peaking out of the ground. Maybe 1.5" . It has been a dry winter and no irrigation. I think we have had 4" of rain since end of September. It is planted in red death clay amended with compost. It is a warm day around 83º today. We have had lots of up and downs in temperatures this year. I don't worry about cold hardiness hear , but invasiveness to land around me so I stuck with the L. horridas.

tex, I think that must be it :-) There are a goodly number of plants, often southern in their origin, that are technically "hardy" in my zone but will not winter over easily or well. Or bloom. I think it is the coolness of our summers that prevents a proper maturing of the plant or the encouragement of blooms or the ripening of the wood. The moisture is less of an issue, as we tend not get nearly as much as many think, although it does tend to be concentrated in winter and spring and that may contribute to the situation.

Your winter temps are consistently cool and consistently damp in the PNW. Here and in OK we have many warm days (with sun). I get many days in the 60's - 80's with dryness and lows in the 40's- upper 50's , then we will get a nasty front that brings us down to Zone temps. OK has very few days that are actually their advertised zone temps and many nights that are above freezing. Probably more days above freezing than below. I have had 6 days below freezing this winter, but we did get to 15º twice , I think.

Cool but not necessarily cold :-) I never saw a frost here this season until a few week ago when it did dip below freezing for a couple of nights. Until then I still had annuals in bloom!! Seldom into the 20's and never into the teens. But then daytime winter temperatures are not very high either......we generally have not much more than a 10-15 degree swing between daytime and nighttime temps in winter.

That uniformity of temperatures in winter is really a boon, as once plants enter dormancy, they stay in dormancy until it is the proper time to emerge. No damage from late spring frosts (we really never get any) as plants are beginning to bud out and never any freeze/thaw issues.

All things considered, I'd not exchange my climate and growing conditions for anywhere else!!

Good for you.

I can't even keep Lantana over in my heated greenhouse and it never grows very well as an annual either. It simply wants more heat and sun than we have in the PNW.

Where I have no problem overwintering lantana indoors (or out). I have a cutting that's finally ready (after growing inside for a year +) to be set out in a month or two. It grew and bloomed during the winter.

I did cuttings last year and they went in the ground almost immediately. Those guys are tough.... but I don't get as cold or damp as you. I bought one plant and cut it back when I planted and made babies. 1 plant made 5 plant routine.

Yeah, I'm pushing it for hardiness here...so I take baby steps to get the greatest success.

I often notice rooted stems when I cut mine back where its made contact with the soil, Back when I was working on filling in a line of tough plants out back in the most awful soil, I got several free plants established quick that way. If you bury a stem, you can clip it off the plant and dig it up in a month or so; its a lot less trouble than rooting cuttings. You can plan ahead and root big stems that way in late summer to dig up and replant in spring and get what amounts to a quart sized plant faster than you'd get with rooted tips.

We should start a thread titled "Gardening on the Cheap" or "Garden tips from Cheapskates"

Well TR start it...I might have a few suggestions!

So even if they're hardy to your zone if they're not frost tolerant they just automatically die the first time you get a frost? I'm a little confused on frost tolerance (or lack of).

Pererenialfan, they can't be both hardy to your zone and non frost tolerant. Hardy means a plant (if perennial) can survive year round in a given area. But plants fail for other reasons than winter cold. In my climate, for example, although winters are never as cold as z7, lantana is not perennial. It succumbs to winter wet and there is insufficient summer heat and sun to allow it to flower and prosper. It is used strictly as a summer bedding plant and even then is not always successful.

Floral is dead-on. That is exactly the way lantana performs in my climate as well. But then, my climate is very similar to hers :-))

Then why buy it? You guys have so many other plants why bother with troublesome lantana.

I don't :-) I don't even particularly care for the plant. But I have dealt with it here frequently enough, both as a nursery buyer and with clients, to know how it performs in this climate. Zone ratings are not always a solid indicator of how well a plant will do in any given environment......that was the message that was attempting to be conveyed.

Nor do I. I don't have a sun trap sheltered garden, nor a large conservatory so I'd be wasting my time and my money.

But ornamentally they're great and perpetual flowering where they ARE hardy. I admit, they're not really eco friendly and reseed in many of our zones too much (not a problem with mine).

They do well in an arid HOT area. They perform when other plants give up the ghost. That is their role in our gardens. They are an acquired taste. They are survivors in a land where surviving is admired. I would imagine that they would look rough , ordinary, and out of place in a lush gentile garden. They look great blooming in the wild in a field of dried unirrigated infertile grass. They are for a rough land where plants have thorns and thick nasty feeling leaves, where people talk about going out into the"bush". My kind of place. We actually have problems with mexican varieties becoming invasive around me.

Its other role is to piss off the Brits and the PNWers with its obvious disltain of their perfect agrarian maritime environment.

Smirk

Yeah...but paeonies, anemones, primula...so not feeling too rueful about lantana tbh, although I have enthusiastically embraced quite a few SW US natives. (mentzelia, callirhoe, talinum, linum, abronia, ipomopsis and malvaviscus spring to mind).

All that first clump that you listed do nothing here... they are dust under my heal. Well, anemones have to be planted every year and it is a toss up if they flower in the EARLY spring under a tree. The big box love to sell them since they are fungible annuals and there is always a sucker or two nostalgic for their past northern spring.

"Its other role is to piss off the Brits and the PNWers with its obvious disdain of the perfect agrarian maritime environment."

wantanamara is hitting some notes with me. Anyone who attempts to garden down here ---where the stubborn brave keep fighting while the weaker types usually throw in the towel once real summer arrives--- knows all about the difficulties we face each long summer--thats not a whine, just a simple fact of life.

Every year on GW, we get to see all those lush, green gardens from places like the PNW and NE where so called 'summer' is the equivalent of a Texas or Oklahoma extended spring rather than the often dreaded, long inferno that is usually dry for weeks on end, in other words-- real summer with no break or end in sight.

We get to see you guys growing plants that look like the pictures we see in magazines and what I've often thought of as the 'false plant advertising' intended to sucker a gullible public into actually believing that plant will look anything like that in my garden, even if I watered twice a day to keep up with instant evaporation in my 'damp spot' amid the bone dry landscape surrounding us when its been in the upper 90's and 100's for weeks without a cloud in sight. Most summers we feel successful if we can keep most of it alive and give up on appearances (or getting tomatoes to set for that matter) as plants wilt, fry, burn, crinkle up, loose foliage and go dormant from the heat.

So yea, its poetic justice that some plants, like the lowly lantana, has the audacity not to perform for the Brits and PNWers along with its disdain for sharing space with weenie plants in those perfect gardens. Makes me love it all the more because its one of those that loves us back like a lot of other plants which don't like living in those perfect agrarian climates.

It is a work horse of a plant down here. I had to learn to like it, being the northern transplant that I am.. Something about the flower and the leaves rubbed me wrong. I still do not like the pale pink and yellow one.. Some of the many hybrids I find fake looking.

I don't like the pale pink and yellow one so much either but I have a big one on the west side I started from a cutting back when I was collecting different hardy types that I got from a Hispanic Church that has a weedy, neglected landscape of robust hard-core Texas plants growing in a torrid spot surrounded by concrete exposed to shadeless, full sun all day in the Hispanic district on the southside along with some kind of thick, tall red-orange one (?).

My favorite is a lower growing, solid orange one--an unknown type. I got a small a cutting from a big plant growing in a spot on the Paseo that has been growing by the curb close to the street for years. Its a big plant, the stems are numerous, thorny & mean; it blooms heavily and non-stop from late spring to fall in a big thick mound that is about 3ft tall x six feet wide. It produces a few seeds that produce plants true to the parent. Obviously it has a lot of 'horrida' in its genes judging by the smaller size of leaves and thorns but its form is different than the bigger and taller L. horrida's I grew from seeds I bought from Native American Plants.

I'm at a crossroads now, I can grow peonies (if I cared too) and some anemone species (not those sold in hardware stores), but I can also grow the SW natives listed (or many of them) as well as things like crinums and passion flower vines.

I like the variety available here...one of the reasons I moved back to Arkansas. You just have to find the right spot for things and you can have your semi-arid plants as well as your woodlanders.

@ TX R, I have the thick tall orange one. L. horrida. I wonder if it is the same type. I don't remember thorns. Calls for more research. LOL. HMMM. Maybe I should get a rooted cutting from you (hint hint).

The horrida has fewer and much thicker main stems than this unknown orange type; it grows more vertical, it gets taller than me, It shuts down periodically in summer to form lots of seeds then picks up blooming again.

I definitely think you would like this orange one, I swear the whole plant is always covered in orange because the blooms are so numerous, it produces seeds but it doesn't shut down. You need one if you don't have it. Just like the L. Horrida, it has small cat-claw type thorns along with the hairy, irritating stickers along the branches, L. camera doesn't, its just got those fine hair-like stickers that irritate your hands when handling it-- no cat claws.

Barron took some cuttings from it. Maybe he will report if it made it or not in Arkansas.

I am feeling my plant lust collector yearnings rumbling in my heart.

While I do enjoy seeing cacti and other xeric plants, I love the lush green of the northern lands far more. :-)

each to their own. I enjoy the lush green when I am up north, but the harshness forces on me a garden "humility" of sorts and attachment that I never had with the land when gardening was easy.

I too am in 7b and my plants come back each year. Cannot tell you exactly when...LOL sorry....but they do come back and I break the dead wood off just above ground level each year.

https://www.gardenweb.com/discussions/1709374/zone-7-hardy-lantana I will take hot summers any day. Why would I ever want to grow Peonies and Primulas anyway? Actually there is one Peony I would love to grow. Our only north American native peony P. brownii. But it needs very specific conditions that I can't meet. Probably wouldn't be much to the liking of most of you, but quite beautiful to me. I think the few that remain are dwindling away out there somewhere, calling for help!........while the hostas and daylilies keep flying off the conveyor belt!

You can keep the hot summers, Jay. I can't stand them. Just don't handle heat well ... never have.

Miss Huff Lantana is the only one cold hardy enough to come back in Zone 7b, but it needs mulch, and if you cut it back in Fall, you risk branches getting water inside and breaking or letting freezing water go to the roots and kill the entire plant. But mulch 3 inches, I've heard can save it.

While this got bumped, I'll note that my 'Chapel Hill' Lantana returned after a cold winter with prolonged temps near 0F, the last tenderish plant to return this spring. It was on a south slope which helped. The variety was selected for hardiness as the name sort of implies.

https://www.gardenweb.com/discussions/6496674/davidrt28-s-winter-2024-2025-damage-report

Agree that borderline plants should never be cut back before spring.