Thank you Ken. They are in a long narrow foundation bed, between two 3 story buildings about 50 ft apart. I planted them last May, everything was removed from the bed, manually aerated clay-ish soil, minor grading adjustments. NO fert. No irrigation. I wonder about the wind...

They are sort of on the cusp of my zone. They were young. Winter was rough?

They aren't really zone 6 plants. Time to move on. Don't be overly shocked if you lose the Encores also.

There are enough azaleas and rhododendrons that are hardy to zone 5 that I don't know why you would mess around with tender ones.

MadG - are you saying the zone 6 to 9 rating from the grower is not accurate? Is that common?

It doesn't seem to be uncommon for a plant to be listed as 'hardy to zone 6', when it has issues below zero. What I am used to seeing in roses is that cultivars are hardy to very specific zone 6's, and YMMV.

The repeat blooming genes are coming from somewhere, and it isn't from a hardy species. That you are losing all of them in a fairly unremarkably cold winter should tell you something.

Thank you both for sharing your knowledge.

April

when you are talking about a couple bucks for a plant ... then zone pushing is fun to do ...

but when you are dealing with expensive plants ... one trick is to go one zone colder with choice ... to protect the investment ...

and of course.. there is the usual advice to not plant a monoculture ... which can be extended to planting multiples ....

bigbox is known to buy in lots of tens of thousands of plants.. and simply ship them all over the US .... not really having any type of local knowledge ... as compared to a good local high end nursery ... where they might not stock these plants .. because they know they are borderline ...

ken

This weekend i was looking for replacements, Big Box - no Bloom-a-thons, no Encore. gigantic local grower - same. Saw rhody's zone 7 in my local zone 6 store. ugh. We can't baby anything, so I will take advice and look for zone 5.

Thank you

Bloom-a-thon Red has not proven totally hardy even in my zone 7a. I've had better luck with the Encores, even though the Bloom-a-thon Red was incredibly beautiful.

I had the lavender, the foliage was gorgeous! But i am convinced that I have to move on... I picked up some local azaleas - Rosebuds