ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW. 
BULLETIN 
OF 
MISCELLANEOUS INFORMATION, 
No. 6.] (1909. 
XXX.—EFFECTS OF THE WIN TER ON TREES AND 
SHRUBS AT KEW. 
W. J. Brean. 
The winter of 1908~9 was the severest that has been experienced 
in the British Isles since 1894-5, and the resulting damage to trees 
and shrubs grown out of doors has been greater than that of the 
intervening 13 winters all put together. Experiments are continually 
being made at Kew as to the hardiness of new or untried trees and 
shrubs, and it is not until such a winter as the last occurs that their 
real powers of resisting cold are ascertained. The results, therefore, 
of a severe winter, although often chastening, are not without value ; 
and it is thought that a few notes relating to the more interesting 
losses and survivals may be useful. Asa matter of fact the list of 
Survivors tells a more serviceable and reliable story than that of the 
losses. The fact that a certain plant has surviv inj 
certain degree of cold without artificial protection hall-marks it 
with a corresponding degree of hardiness in the particular place 
where it grows. But one cannot assume so positively that another 
plant which has died under the same conditions is corresponding] 
tender. So much depends on attendant circumstances. Its deat 
may be due to a series of adverse conditions of which the winter’s 
cold is but the culminating one. : 
It must be admitted, however, that the damage done to vegetation 
during the winter of 1908-9 was not due so much to long aoe of 
intense cold as to violent alternations between intense cold 
unseasonable warmth. The munth of October, 1908, was extremely 
mild, often even summerlike. The thermometer rarely fell below 
ahr. 
(18507—6a.) Wt. 108—471, 1375. 7/09. D&S, — 
