Frost bites

The winter freeze has killed half the plants in some public gardens. So which blooms won't we be seeing this year?

In pictures: The casualties of the recent harsh frosts
Hebe Pink Elephant Variegated evergreen flowering shrub. Photograph: Alamy

Vast paddles of banana leaves swaying in the sea breeze, towering blue flower spikes of echiums piercing bluer sky, hillsides bursting with smooth, fat succulents - many of the sights associated with the plant life of Cornwall and Devon will be absent this year. Few gardens in the southwest have escaped the fierce chill of the last few weeks. Some endured wet, heavy snow that snapped the branches of trees. Some survived the initial frost but were then hit by an unusually strong northeasterly breeze.

But all got a deep, penetrating frost, to -11C in places. In some National Trust gardens, up to 60% of the plants have been damaged or lost.

"It's taken a bit of the glamour away," says John Lanyon, garden manager of NT gardens Trelissick and Glendurgan, in Cornwall. A 10ft-tall Canary Island date palm, (phoenix canariensis), has most probably been lost at Trelissick, while at Glendurgan two smaller, more unusual palms (washingtonia filifera and rhopalostylis sapida) are "dead as dodos". He has also noticed many Mediterranean plants giving up the ghost. "They have clung on through the last two wet summers, hating the conditions, and for many cistus and rosemary plants this frost seems to have been the final straw."

Colourful gazanias and lampranthus, grown elsewhere as summer bedding plants but left out all year in Cornwall, have also gone to the big patio planter in the sky.

Jan Hoyland, head gardener at Trengwainton in Cornwall, has noticed that plants that are normally tough have been suffering. "Hebes can usually cope with anything, but here they have got used to soft living and have been knocked right back."

Again, it will be the plants with the wow factor that will be missing - there will be no echiums in flower this year. The littlest seedlings have survived, but the larger plants, about to complete their three-year cycle and burst into impressive bloom, have copped it. Succulent agaves and aeoniums that got wet before the frosts are mush. Tree ferns usually have green fronds all winter but have been blackened. Delicate fuchsia boliviana, and many of its tougher relatives, have been cut to the ground, but should resprout. Large stands of the Japanese hardy banana, have collapsed on themselves. They, too, should live to waft another day, but it will take a good few years before they cut the impressive, subtropical dash they previously did.

Despite the universal devastation, there seems an almost audacious determination to look on the bright side. "It's quite helpful, in a way," reasons Graham Jeffery, owner of Trevena Cross Nursery in Cornwall, which has lost up to £40,000 worth of subtropical plants. "Many plants surprised us. This has sorted out which are the hardiest. If you don't get this sort of frost, and we never do, you are always relying on someone else's information."

Hoyland agrees. "The death of a plant isn't the end of the world," she says. "You suddenly have a space and think, 'Hmm ... What could I plant there?'"