ear Clients and Friends,

 

Two weeks after I graduated from Virginia Tech, many years ago, I moved to Central Florida. I know you are thinking: “Great place for a horticulturist! Lots of exotic plants!” Well, true. I confess, though, that the only reason I moved to Florida after graduation was because I was tired of being COLD! As many of you know, Virginia Tech is located atop a plateau in Southwest Virginia, elevation of about 2100 feet. Cold winds blow all winter long across the plateau. It is a gorgeous place, yet those few winters during my college years were particularly bitter and much colder than the winters I had known growing up in Alexandria.

Ironically, I went there to escape the Virginia cold and we had some of the coldest weather ever recorded in Central Florida. This was the early 1980s, and the winters were brutal up and down the East Coast. In 1982, the same year of the Air Florida crash into the Potomac River, we had an awful freeze in Central Florida. It lasted for three or four nights. Prior to this freeze, oranges and other citrus crops were grown commercially well north of Orlando. The temperatures went down to 12 or 14 degrees for several nights in a row and the damage to the agriculture and nursery industries was just staggering. Orange groves all the way down to Lake Okeechobee were frozen to the ground and killed. Of course, the freezes killed much up and down the East Coast, too—things that we always thought were tried-and-true.

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