One of our local garden experts writes for a regional gardening magazine that I subscribe to. He wrote an article in late winter lamenting the recent heuchera craze. While he loves heucheras and has been tempted to plant many of the new cultivars himself, he admits that they may not be living up to the hype, especially here in colder climates like southern Wisconsin. Apparently the plants are not surviving winter as well as promised.
When I read the article, it was early enough in the year that my perennials were still fast asleep in the ground, so I couldn’t run outside and check on my heucheras. I’ve probably added about 20 of them to my yard in the last couple of years, and every time I visit a garden center I have to pry myself away from the heuchera area for fear I’ll be tempted to haul home another one of the colorful beauties.
When my perennials finally poked their heads out of the soil in late April, I discovered that winter had been very rough on my roses and butterfly bushes. I was immediately concerned about my (perhaps) not-as-hardy-as-I-thought-they-were heucheras.
While I lost quite a few roses and butterfly bushes, I only lost one heuchera…or so I thought. ‘Root Beer’ had been nibbled by rabbits repeatedly last summer. Then came the harsh winter. I waited patiently, but there was no sign of life even in late May, so I eventually gave up and split a daylily and moved it where ‘Root Beer’ once grew.
A few weeks ago I was doing some weeding and parted some daylily leaves and there was ‘Root Beer’, tiny but alive. I moved the plant to a new location where it wouldn’t be buried by large perennials and it’s filling out nicely.
Some of my heucheras have heaved out of the ground from freezing and thawing, and I’ve had to reset them in the ground in the spring, but I haven’t lost a single plant. Perhaps I’m the exception not the rule, but as long as heucheras keep surviving in my yard, I will keep adding them to my collection because nothing adds spring-to-frost color to shady areas like heucheras.