The Cold Hardieness of Mature Mango Trees

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:18]Don't worry, they're not after me.

[00:00:21]It's the helicopters. Those are the ones I worry about.

[00:00:26]Now, we're off in We're out here in the country. It's legal to uh shoot guns.

[00:00:30]Not I don't really like guns myself, but someone who is here does. So, they're over there shooting guns safely. Um but uh instead of concentrating on that, let's concentrate on the uh cold damage this year. This is the winter's property. It's a very frostfree property. Generally, I haven't gotten too much cold up here because of all these wonderful things that uh happen here because of the topography uh around the hill. All this cold air drains away down in the valley where it's much colder. That's what allows us to grow so much citrus up here commercially and uh have it do so well and all kinds of other fun things. Uh but uh I planted a whole bunch of things to see well to have fun with and we're going to see how they performed. Now here is a experimental palm that is a hybrid between a regular queen palm and a uh very rare relative palm. Siagris Romans is the queen palm and the other parent is Syris flexiosa for flexible and it's a really flexiosa is a very miniaturized palm really fine texture so you can see what happened it got this fine texture really nice now what we didn't know is well how cold hearty is it as you can see the regular queen palms are pretty darn cold hearty there's one right there on the right and um no damage whatsoever However, this guy got torched. Look, it'll come back. It's not going to die. But look.

[00:02:10]So, yeah. I was hoping in this location it wouldn't. But it tells you like how cold we got. We got really cold here. So, there's all kinds of interesting things to see because, you know, you can see the relative cold hardiness of any given plant out here and how it behaved. You know, lots of cold damage on cold enough to just absolutely fry absolutely fry these this bulge here. I mean, so definitely below freezing. Uh, now here's another interesting thing. This is Euphoria Turi Kellyi sticks on fire. And you can see it just got torched. It was a big aggressive bush. It got torched deep down inside from the cold. So, we're going to see what happens. Probably have to cut it down. Let it start over, which is probably good because it was getting too big anyway. Uh you can see some parts of it over here are um a little better off because they were below this piece of wood here. Um what else am I seeing as far as cold damage goes?

[00:03:19]Some things are looking pretty good. You could see uh these aeoniums didn't really have much of a problem. But over here, I know the first thing I noticed when it got really cold was the uh car stripes got spotted all over. Not looking good. That's definitely cold damage there. Some of these plants aren't so hardy they don't really get cold damage. But uh it's good to have some indicator plants meaning you know you know really sensitive plants because you'll know uh if it got to that level of cold or not which the uh obviously the palms now I know are and the uh car stripes agave and especially the euphoria turely. Um but here's the most interesting thing that I'm finding.

[00:04:07]We know we got really cold. There's, you know, fair amount of damage here, there, and everywhere. But look what didn't get damaged is my mango tree, right? They say, "Well, how cold hearty are mango trees?"

[00:04:22]And they always say, "Well, you know, the young ones are hardy to like 30° and the old ones are hardy to 25°." I'm going to have to agree with that because I think that we got down I mean I think we got down to 25 degrees and this big boy here is hardly any damage at all.

[00:04:38]Like on the very top maybe where it's really exposed there's a little bit of burn up there but predominantly the tree looks more or less perfect like any other year. I know it's hard to to ignore the gunfire but we're just going to have to get through it here. Uh cuz I told them they could shoot. I forgot I was going to make a video. Anyway, yeah.

[00:05:01]So, look at that. It's really interesting. Um, in fact, it got so cold here that even look even the uh agave tenuada down here got damaged underneath all this. Uh, and you can see there's spotting on this one if you look closely. That's from cold and that's from freezing temperatures.

[00:05:24]So, um, yeah, and you can understand how right next to the house might might be more protected, but out here, even where it's away from the house, very far away from the house, you know, we're just getting a few little spots on the plant.

[00:05:38]Uh, but, uh, yeah, like I'm really encouraged by that because I'm about to plant a whole bunch of mangoes kind of around the corner there in the ground permanently. And I do know that, you know, it's going to be colder over there. that's more exposed than here in this microclimate. But um but at least I know that uh you know in a location where Agaveia Tenuada got slightly damaged in a really protected spot and even the one I showed you down there is is in a kind of a protected spot underneath that arbor. It got damaged enough got cold enough to damage those plants. What does that say? that says that if you have a place where it's typically warm enough in your microclimate to support agave tenuada like this without getting cold damaged.

[00:06:28]Uh there's the cold damage again. Then you can most likely grow uh mangoes as well.

[00:06:38]And then so here's another one down here. We can take a look at it. But there's a bunch of them just to see.

[00:06:43]This is like my temperature. I don't have a temperature gauge here. I should look how bad that looks. That's from cold. Cold did that. And the mango looks great. Let's check you out. This one's not as bad. You can see the parts that were exposed, the black spots.

[00:07:03]Um, but yeah, that's kind of uh what I'm seeing here. So, I'm very encouraged.

[00:07:10]I'm kind of bummed that it got cold, don't get me wrong. But it did give me an opportunity to see how tough those mangoes are when they're large because they always say that, you know, big mature trees are hardier. And I've talked about this with some palm society members and especially with king palms. And king palms are very young. They seem to be very, very tender. Then when they get older, they just seem to weather the freeze better. And you'd think that the tissue in the foliage is the same. But my buddy who knows a lot and has thought about a lot about it has said, "Gary, I think what's happening is uh it's like a baby's skin.

[00:07:50]Baby's skin is really tender. Apply sunburns really easy and gets problematic easily. But a older person's skin is just tougher. and he thinks that just this this the leaf surfaces alone on mature plants are tougher and hardier than younger plants even though it's the same genetic material. That's the theory. So anyway, just wanted to show you the mango tree on February 1st after probably the coldest year here in a decade. Um, we've had periods where at the nursery in Richmond, we had cold damage and none here. This year is the opposite. We have no damage in Richmond and we have substantial cosmetic damage here. I don't know if anything's going to die from the cold. I don't think so. But anyway, just wanted to show you that. Thought it was interesting. Hope you're having a great day.