Imagine a cup of water. If you put it in a freezer at 0*, it will quickly freeze & the temperature of the solidified water will quickly come to 0* - let's say in an hour. If you put it in a Styrofoam cup, the temperature will still drop to 0*, but it might take 1-1/2 - 2 hrs. If you put the Styrofoam cup in a small cooler & put the small cooler in the freezer, it might take 10-12 hours for the temperature to drop to 0*, but it WILL drop to that temperature. You must have an extraneous source of heat to trap, if insulation is to serve a purpose. E.g., if you set a plant on the garage floor and cover it with an overturned cardboard box for its insulative value, it will trap the heat rising through the garage floor. So if the air temperature in the garage dropped to 0* because you left the door open over night, the temperature under the box might only be 20*. If you just wrap your plants in bubble wrap, it will serve no purpose unless you have a heat source that allows heat into the soil so you can trap it with insulation. Toss a curling iron in the cooler with the Styrofoam cup in the cooler & it won't freeze because you have heat from an extraneous source you can trap. Define the stems as any part of the plant you don't want to lose. I'm assuming you'll cut the plant back after it loses its foliage as it blooms on new wood. Simply wrap the top in burlap or an old blanket. It needs to breathe to prevent fungal issues, and the blanket/burlap isn't 'insulation' - it's a wind break to slow dessication. Wrap the stems before the soil freezes solid. Plants are at greater risk of dessication when water is locked in ice & unavailable. You'll know if the plant is getting too dry because you'll be checking it every 2-3 weeks to see - right? ;-) Al

Relax! You can go after this genus with a chain saw and it'll pop right back up. In fact, most honeysuckles need a severe pruning every couple of years to encourage new shoots and rejuvenate the plant. However, since you've got it on a fence, you may want to avoid the chainsaw, and focus instead on the three D's: diseased, damaged or deranged growth. Old, woody stems can be cut back hard; anything that's died off or has got galls or fungus or doesn't look healthy gets cut back to the ground, and any stems that are headed where you don't want them to can be cut back to a proper area as well. It'll look really bare for a few weeks, but new growth will start up right away and you'll be back in honeysuckle heaven in no time. Enjoy! Jim

Salt is safe unless you are in a desert area. Up here, we dump truckloads of it into the environment for snow removal every year. It will only work in dry weather, because rain will take it into the ground and on its way to the ocean. There is always salt in the ground and in water in small ammounts and it only concentrates in the ocean and some rare inland areas that do not drain to the ocean. The main problem you have is the extreme local invasiveness of japanese honeysuckle. As long as it grows on the other side of your fence, it will keep spreading to your side. And the more vigorous the growth on the other side of the fence, the more virogously it will try to spread. If you do not remove it all, you will be fighting this battle forever regardless of what you do on your side of the fence. Ziggy

heathen robinimi and anyone else Im quite aware this is a salvia forum but many people grow salvia because of feeding hummers of which coral and goldflame will do and just thought I could get some friendly expert advice . How wrong I was.