Hardiness Zones and Bergamot in Zone 3A
Answered by: Inge Poot
Question from: Colleen Jones
Posted on: July 12, 1999

I’m located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Richters has an excellent home page, but one question - to what zone are your perennials/seeds considered hardy? I’m in zone 3a and I know from experience to treat this zone as zone 2. I’d love the rose scented bergamot, for example, but need to know how to treat it.

Plants that we designate as hardy perennials are winterhardy in zone 5. We too have decided that this is too limiting for our international market and plan to put ranges of zones the plants can survive in, into the year 2000 catalogue. The zones may not be quite accurate to start with but we hope that customer feedback will fine-tune this in the years to come. Unfortunately hardyness is not only determined by the temperatures the plant is grown in, but also other environmental factors, such as persistance of snow cover, mulch, adaption of plant to pH of its soil, vigour of plant, maturity of tissues at onset of freezing temperatures, porosity of soil -both because of sensitivity of some plants to winter wetness and because the texture determines how quickly the frost gets into the soil and how deep it will freeze.

All of our bergamots are rated for zones 4 to 10. Therefore in your zone you have to overwinter them indoors.

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