Over-wintering banana trees

What a week it's been! Wind, snow, frost, rain, sleet, black ice. Just the type of weather banana trees don't like. Fortunately, before the big chill hit the UK this week, I wrapped up most of the banana tress in Cowick Garden.

Last year it was a little easier to wrap them up as by the time the freezing cold temperatures arrived, the leaves had already withered and were hanging by the stems so it was easy enough to throw over the frost jackets. This year the cold arrived so suddenly that all the leaves were still green and spread out so wrapping up proved a bit tricky.

I started by making sure the base of the stems and the ground around the plants were covered in bark chip as that protects the soil from frost and keeps it 'warm'. I then took some sheets of frost fleece, folded them in two and wrapped the fleece around the stem several times all the way up until I reached the leaves. Then, on the smaller banana trees I gathered the leaves as close to the stem as possible and covered the entire tree with a frost jacket. I've read that some people remove the leaves, however the leaves are added protection against the frost so I'd advise leaving them hanging around the stems (even if it doesn't look very decorative!) as this will give your banana plants an extra buffer against the cold.

On the larger plants it was not possible to put a frost jacket over them as they are too tall and the leaves are too spread out. However, the larger plants should be fine as they are quite hardy by now. It's the smaller banana plants that we need to worry about so they are the ones that have frost fleece all around the stems and a nice cosy frost jacket on top. Some of the larger plants haven't been wrapped up at all as we didn't wrap them up last year and they were fine. However, this winter is proving to be a very cold one (-5 degrees tonight apparently!) so we may have to wrap the larger ones if this cold weather continues.

If we could, we'd take ourselves and our palms and our banana trees off to a sunny warm tropical island right now -which is where we all really belong!