Great advice here! Thank you to the experts! I have the browning needles problem with a green mound juniper I received for Christmas. It's from bonzaioutlet.com. It appears to be in dirt with little green balls on top. It's wired into the pot so I can't get it out to check what's on the bottom unless I cut the wire. It's in a humidity tray with stones and I mist it daily. It's in a sunny south facing window. I have a feeling from reading this thread that I am over-watering it so I threw out the stones (gonna get new ones) and fertilized it with the stuff (fish based) it came with. It has some new growth so I think it's able to be saved.... tell me what I should do? Thanks you guys! I live in Virginia in an apartment so I can't plant it outside.

A little more. If you have questions ..... Commonly, each species of plant has a general range of cold-hardiness, but within species and cultivar, cold-hardiness is genetically determined. That is to say that a plant that is propagated from cuttings or tissue culture will have the same ability to resist cold as the parent plant. Plants cannot "develop" a greater degree of cold-hardiness by repeated or prolonged exposure to cold, even after 100 years (trees). If we pick any plant at random, it may or may not be able to withstand freezing temperatures. The determining factor is the plants ability to prevent freezing of bound water. Bound water is the water inside of cell walls. There are actually three kinds of water to consider when we discuss "freezing" or cold-hardiness. The water held in soil - When this water freezes, and it can freeze the soil mass solid, it doesn't necessarily kill the plant or tissues. Then there is free or unbound water, also called inter-cellular water - This is water that is found in plant tissues, but is outside of living cells cells. This water can also freeze solid and not kill the plant. The final type of water is bound water, or intra-cellular water - If temperatures drop low enough to freeze bound water, the frozen cells and the tissues they form die. This is the freeze damage that kills plants. Fortunately, nature has an antifreeze. Even though temperatures drop well below freezing, all plants don't die. In hardy plants, physiological changes occur as temperatures drop. The plant moves solutes (sugars, salts, starches) into cells and moves water out of cells to inter-cellular spaces in tissues. These solutes act as antifreeze, allowing water in cells to remain liquid to sometimes extremely low temperatures. The above is a description of super-cooling in plants. Some plants even take advantage of another process to withstand very low temps called intra-cellular dehydration. Any/all parts of your plants can stay frozen for extended periods or go through multiple freeze/thaw cycles w/o damage, so long as the temperature does not fall below that required to freeze intra-cellular water. If roots remain frozen, but temperatures remain above killing lows, dessication is the primary concern. If the tree is able to take up water, but temperatures are too low for the tree to grow and make food, stored energy becomes the critical issue. Dormant and quiescent plants are still using energy from their reserves (like a drain on a battery). If those reserves are depleted before the plant can produce photosynthesizing mass, the organism dies. There are a number of cultural factors that also have some affect on the cold-hardiness of individual plants, some of which are length of exposure to seasonal cold, water availability (drought stressed plants are more cold tolerant), how recently planted/repotted, etc. Al

Ry - Mulch is a fair insulator if your plants, or plants and pots are sunk into the ground and then mulched, which actually makes the second pot entirely superfluous; but what you suggested: ".... sink it into a larger pot filled with mulch. As long as the smaller pot is in that larger pot it will be protected by [from] the cold." is not true. If it WAS true, all we would need do to keep the Dixie cup I mentioned in the example above would be to mulch it and put it in the freezer. It just doesn't work that way. Even in the example above, where I offered the illustration of the Dixie cup in the cooler in the freezer, the water in the cup would quickly freeze; however, if you had a warm curling iron or other source of heat inside the cooler in the freezer to capture (that extraneous source of heat I mentioned - most often geothermal heat) heat, the water would not freeze. Wind has nothing to do with killing low temperatures. Windchill has no effect on plants. Wind might desiccate exposed tissues, but wind doesn't make the soil or air any colder unless we can add in the effects of evaporative cooling, and since we are talking about temperatures below freezing, evaporation is a non-issue. Even sublimation, which is when a solid like ice or snow changes directly into a gas, skipping the liquid phase entirely, doesn't enter the picture here. Ra - Dormant plants don't need light. Technically, when temperatures are high enough, evergreens are capable of carrying on a tiny little bit of photosynthesis in the presence of light, but it's so insignificant we usually simply answer no. I wasn't suggesting you cover your plant with a box outdoors, only using that as an illustration and a viable method of 'pushing the zone' when you over-winter plant material in the garage. I over-winter at least 50 junipers in my garage with no protection. About 4 times each winter, I toss a little snow on them so they don't dry out & call it good. You needn't fear having the soil freeze. Here is a copy/paste job from something I wrote on another thread. It explains a little about cold-hardiness: "Your question more closely asks what temperatures will my tree tolerate, but it leaves unanswered the question of what temps are best. It would be best if you could keep actual soil temperatures above 25 and below 42* for the winter. Here is a longer explanation about cold-hardiness I left on this forum previously. If it leaves you with questions, just ask: Commonly, each species of plant has a general range of cold-hardiness. Within species and cultivar, cold-hardiness is genetically determined. That is to say that a plant that is propagated from cuttings or tissue culture will have the same ability to resist cold as the parent plant. Plants cannot "develop" a greater degree of cold-hardiness by repeated or prolonged exposure to cold, even after 100 years (trees). If we pick any plant at random, it may or may not be able to withstand freezing temperatures. The determining factor is the plants ability to prevent freezing of bound water. Bound water is the water inside of cells. There are actually three kinds of water to consider when we discuss "freezing". The water held in soil - When this water freezes, and it can freeze the soil mass solid, it doesn't necessarily kill the plant or tissues. Then there is free or unbound water, also called inter-cellular water. This is water that is found in plant tissues, but is outside of living cells cells. This water can also freeze solid and not kill the plant. The final type of water is bound water or intra-cellular water. If temperatures drop low enough to freeze this water, the cell/tissue/plant dies. This is the freeze damage that kills plants. Fortunately, nature has an antifreeze. Even though temperatures drop well below freezing, all plants don't die. In hardy plants, physiological changes occur as temperatures drop. The plant moves solutes (sugars, salts, starches) into cells and moves water out of cells to inter-cellular spaces in tissues. These solutes act as antifreeze, allowing water in cells to remain liquid to sometimes extremely low temperatures. The above is a description of super-cooling in plants. Some plants even take advantage of another process to withstand very low temps called intra-cellular dehydration. The roots of your trees can stay frozen for extended periods or go through multiple freeze/thaw cycles w/o damage, so long as the temperature does not fall below that required to freeze intra-cellular water. If roots remain frozen, but temperatures remain above killing lows, dessication is the primary concern. If the tree is able to take up water, but temperatures are too low for the tree to grow and make food, stored energy becomes the critical issue. Dormant and quiescent trees are still using energy from their reserves (like a drain on a battery). If those reserves are depleted before the tree can produce photosynthesizing mass, the organism dies. There are a number of factors that have some affect on the cold-hardiness of individual plants, some of which are length of exposure to seasonal cold, water availability (drought stressed plants are more cold tolerant), how recently planted/repotted, etc No one can give a definitive answer that even comes close to accurately assessing the temperature at which bound water will freeze that covers the whole species. Unbound water is of little concern & will usually freeze somewhere around 28*. Some material will be able to withstand little cold & roots could freeze/die at (actual) root temperatures as warm as 25-27*. Other plants may tolerate much colder actual root temperatures - as low as 10*. There's just no way of knowing unless you have a feeling for how cold-tolerant the genetic material the plant was derived from might be, and finding out is expensive (from the plant's perspective). ;o) Another example of this genetic variance is that trees found growing and fruiting well closer to the equator need no chill time, while other trees, derived of genetic stock from a more northerly provenance may need a period of chill to grow with optimum vitality in the subsequent growth period/cycle. It's wise to remember that root death isn't instantaneous at one particular temperature. Roots succumb to cold over a range of chill with cultural conditions affecting the process. The finest roots will die first, and the slightly thicker and more lignified roots will follow, with the last of the roots to succumb being the more perennial and thickest roots. Since any root death is a setback from an energy allocation perspective, and root regeneration takes valuable time, it's probably best to keep actual root temperatures in the 25-40* range as long as we can when the tree is resting, even though the organism as a whole could tolerate much lower temperatures. Even well established trees become very much like cuttings if all but the roots essential to keep the tree viable are lost to cold. Regeneration of roots is an expensive energy outlay and causes the trees to leaf out later than they normally would and shortens the natural growth period and reduces the potential increase in biomass for the next growth cycle and perhaps beyond. and We know that when trees are exposed to freezing, the finest hair roots - the ones that do the lions share of the work are the first to die. In many woody plants, these roots begin to die as soil temperatures drop below 30-32*. As temperatures drop further, larger and larger roots succumb to killing low temperatures. The point is - that many trees that SURVIVE are left with only the largest roots to support them because much of the rootage has frozen. These trees are slow to respond in the spring because they need to utilize stored energy to regenerate lost rootage before they can move sufficient water and the nutrients dissolved in water to support either growth or the flush of foliage that makes the food that allows the tree to grow (this, in the case of deciduous material). So, while trees might survive exposure to borderline killing low temperatures unprotected, we KNOW it is better for the tree, especially from an energy management perspective, if we give them protection that ensures actual root temperatures don't drop low enough to kill even the finest roots. For most temperate trees, that means we should strive to keep low root temperatures in the upper 20s at their lowest, and below 42* to keep them from growing until spring when we can get them into good light w/o worrying about frost/freeze. Hope that helped. Al

Kenneth, I'm presently enrolled in the certificate conifers course being taught at Longwood by Richard Bitner and I am very familiar with Juniperus chinensis and Juniperus virginiana, both of which are ruled out in the case of my volunteer. Please come down off your ladder and read my post. There is no adult - scale foliage on my plant, only juvenile - pointed needles. I have surmised that my volunteer is going to overgrow it's location, which is not a problem. A few back-n-forth's with my hand saw and it's history. I just would like to know what variety of Juniper took up residence.