On 2 Feb 2009, at 23:27, Uli Urban wrote: > ...it is one of the coldest winter recorded in Germany. > There is a bed of exotics covered with cold-frame windows. There are the > hardy agapanthus, Tulbaghia violacea, Ismene, Albuca shawii and other > Albucas, Kniphofia, Oxalis, Mirabils and Mexican Salvias in it...... may > be I should say were in it? As everything is frozen, I assume the damage > will only become apparent later in spring. I moved to my present house in the fall of 1988. The hundreds of pots of plants I'd dug from my old garden, including many bulbs, were parked on a large lawn. Little did I know how badly drained my soil is! By the end of January 1989, the pots were sitting in a sheet of water and were soaking wet. The evening of January 31 (a date I remember all too well), the temperature began to drop, a prelude to a month-long cold spell during which the temperature rarely got above the freezing point. The result was a holocaust, with the majority of the potted plants killed outright by the combination of wet soil and an extended hard freeze. As I carried out the melancholy task of dumping out each pot into a tray and looking for surviving bulbs, I dumped all the soil onto an area that happens to be one of the scarce winter-dry sites in my garden, knowing that my visual examination would overlook very small bulblets. In the years after, that area produced a number of surprises due to tiny survivor bulblets reaching maturity. Hence some advice for Uli: Don't disturb the contents of your covered frame. Just leave it and you may be pleasantly surprised when things you expected to lose reappear over the next two years. And keep careful track of what has survived, then post the list of geophytes here as a record of hardiness. Good luck. -- Rodger Whitlock Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Maritime Zone 8, a cool Mediterranean climate on beautiful Vancouver Island http://maps.google.ca/maps/…