Clouds are the best thing possible to hold the temperature up. Clear and no wind is when the worst freezes typically happen. But frost doesn't matter. It's all about temperature which is pretty hard to accurately measure in an orchard setting. After bloom damage starts at about 28 and gets severe at about 24F.

If we should get a late frost here in zone 8 your fern should be OK since it is sheltered by the porch. Imagine the poor birds if they came back and could not find the nest they worked so hard to make.

Are sure you mean a hard freeze? In gardening terms, a hard freeze is defined as period of cold that kills seasonal and deciduous vegetation (i.e. annuals), could damage new evergreen foliage, the ground freezes and heavy ice forms in any puddles or water collection recepticals. I know you experienced a rather sharp temperature drop, however I'd guess it was only a hard frost, in which any remaining annuals and deciduous foliage was affected. It takes quite a bit more than that and for an extended period to damage hydrangeas in your climate. Just leave the plants alone. You can remove the blackened, frozen foliage if you wish or if the plants are very visible and deadhead any remaining flowerheads but it's not necessary. Don't cut back. In the spring when new growth is evident, you can remove any obviously dead wood but you don't want to do any heavy pruning, either now or then, otherwise you may remove very viable flowerbuds and reduce or eliminate flowering. Winter protection of hydrangeas in zone 8 is pretty much unnecessary. The exception would be a late hard frost in spring after new growth has already begun.

Bon, I expect it will get pretty miserable here on Sunday too. I think our worst weather at this end of the state will be Sunday and Monday. Right now our temperature is hovering at 33 degrees, but most of the rain has moved on...not that much fell, a little over a tenth of an inch, but any rain is good. I can see more rain on the Texas radar to our southwest but when it gets about a county away from us, it vanishes. That's the story of our year---rain vanishes when it gets close to us. I won't mind if the ice vanishes before it reaches us though. (grin) For the rest of the weekend, the weather is expected to be about the same as it is right now---with temperatures here hovering in the low 30s and rain coming through in little waves. The issue will be whether the rain falls while we are at 32 or below or if if falls when we are 33 degrees or higher. Thursday was an odd day. We had snakes out in the yard, which I'm never happy about, but it was oddly warm for this late in November. We made it up to 69 degrees before the cold front rolled in and dropped us about 30 degrees in three hours. Earlier in the day, when walking past the garden on my way back from the mailbox, I saw a watermelon in the garden. How I have missed seeing it before now is beyond me, but it looked whole and intact, so I brought in the mail (so it wouldn't blow away) and went out to the garden to pick the watermelon. We have been down as low as 19 degrees, so I figured it was rotted on the bottom, perhaps, and only looked good on the top. I picked it from the dead vine, and it was whole and intact. How crazy is that? After carrying the melon inside, I cut it in half, expecting the flavor to be poor because we had so much rain in October and early November. If the flavor was poor, I was going to feed it to the chickens. Nope. The flavor was good. In fact, it was great, so I celebrated the survival of the watermelon by eating some of it, and saving the rest for other family members. Then I carried the rind out to the chickens and they happily picked it clean of any remaining bits of red flesh. Enjoying a slice of the 'Harvest Moon' watermelon in the final hours before a brutal cold front arrived was a fittingly weird end to a weird growing season. The plant itself had roamed and rambled around the garden before the freeze got it, and had produced plenty of melons in the summer months, but none in the fall. I never thought it would have produced a melon so late in fall that would survive several freezing nights. I likely didn't see it before because cosmos and zinnias sort of surrounded the part of the plant where this melon was. Still, I walk by the garden every day on my way to the mailbox and I do generally look at it as I go by, and I still don't know why I didn't see the melon before now. Harvest Moon was probably my best producer in terms of pounds of melons this summer, although Yellow Doll produced a larger number of melons per plant. It is just that Yellow Doll is a really small melon. I hope y'all stay warm and safe up there, and that the ice misses your place, or at least that it melts quickly. Our driveway is a long, gentle, uphill slope, so when ice falls, we sometimes have problems getting up or down the driveway without sliding off of it. That is reason enough (I think) to stay home when it is icy, but Tim and Chris both are pigheaded and try to make that long drive to work in Dallas despite the ice. I've been waiting for a quiet day to sit and flip through the seed catalogs, and I am thinking that today will be it. Other than going outside to feed the animals after sunrise, I don't plan on being outside much. The wind chills are going to be brutally cold, especially since we haven't had enough cold yet for our bodies to get acclimated to the colder temperatures. We remain, still (and forever, it seems), abnormally dry here. I keep thinking we'll get a good 2 or 3" rainfall that will pull us out of drought for at least a week or two. Sadly, it isn't happening. Obviously it won't happen this weekend because the forecasted rain/ice amounts are really low (and I'm okay with that). Our local TV met said last night that all the kids hoping for a snow day today were going to be disappointed, and that their best chance of having a snow day here will be Monday. It seems ludicrous that we're talking about snow days in November. We started this week with an 80 degree day and I guess we'll end it with a 30 or 32-degree night. That sort of sums up Oklahoma weather in a nutshell. Dawn