Landscape Plants and Trees Diseases

RAYMOND, Miss. -- The hard freeze that swept Mississippi on March 19 and 20 dampened some of spring’s early displays and left many landscape plants with unsightly cold damage. Now, homeowners are wondering what to do about their landscape plants that lost their leaves or have brown-tipped or brown, shriveled leaves.

Native plants are talked about quite a lot in the gardening world. Everyone talks about what great plants they are to have in your landscape, but what exactly are they? 

Plants across the state that suffered from the unusually cold weather just days before Christmas will need some help recovering from damage they suffered in the deep freeze. Mike Brown, state climatologist and Mississippi State University meteorologist, said Mississippi’s average late December temperature is 44 degrees on the coast, 38 degrees in central Mississippi and 34 degrees in north Mississippi.

Pruning is one of the least understood gardening tasks and for good reason – it’s confusing. When, how, and if you should prune depends on the type of plant or tree you have and your goal for the plant. Check out these pruning tasks for the last one-third of the year.

A few sassafras trees across Mississippi have started to show signs of dieback, and Mississippi State University is asking for help in identifying affected trees. The trees are suspected of having laurel wilt, a disease caused by a fungus that has already proven deadly to the state’s redbay trees. The fungus is carried by the redbay ambrosia beetle, an invasive species native to Asia.