Sacha wrote:

I have 2 plumbago plants that both flowered well in the summer,
and well into the autumn.
But both now look very dead.

Isn't plumbago reasonably hardy?
Should admit that this is in Tuscany;
the winter is usually a bit milder than the UK, but not much.

It's not sold as hardy in UK, though in some sheltered and
well-drained gardens, it will take temps to around -6C. I thought
Tuscan winters could be very cold? But apart from the cold, your
problems could arise when the snow melts and saturates its roots,
because they do need good drainage. But I'd leave them until spring
has really got going and see what happens. They might come back from
the base, x fingers.

Thanks for the advice.
The plumbago plants were sold at a garden centre here
with no suggestion they needed to be protected in the winter.
(This centre usually gives quite a lot of advice on how to treat plants.)

I spent many years in Suffolk, which as I recall
was slightly colder than Antarctica,
before moving to Dublin which is having the first snow now
that I have seen there in 15 years.
Tuscany is about the same as Dublin in my experience.
Even today it is around 2 degrees Centigrade;
I don't know what the snow thinks it is doing ...

I'll wait as you suggest to see how the plants do in the spring.
I hope they survive, as they were very pretty.


--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland