Usually in the wintertime watching my rhododendron through the window proves to be the best way to tell how cold it is outside. When the temperature drops the leaves close up tightly. The colder it gets, the more they contract. This year they spent a lot of time closed up.
When the weather warms up, the plant opens it's leaves up fully again. It reminds me of the opening and closing of an umbrella. And it is a fun and, though not precise, fairly accurate way to see how cold it is outside without looking at your thermometer or venturing outside.
Unfortunately, this spring I noticed that a lot of very large branches on the bushes were not only not opening anymore they were turning brown. This has never happened before. But we had such a very long, very cold winter that I guess they just couldn't handle the severity of the elements.
At first I was heartbroken. I thought that my beautiful bushes were destroyed but then I realized that, although there was a significant amount of damage, none of the bushes were completely dead. So I am going to wait until they bloom in the beginning of June and then severely prune them and hope that they come back to their former beauty. I guess only time will tell. I hope your plants fared better through the harsh winter of 2013-2014!
