Azaleas with freeze damage will need to be cut back once they start to grow.

It doesn’t take a genius or even a gardener to tell that our azaleas and roses suffered mightily during this winter’s deep freeze. Many other plants from southeast Asia suffered damage as well, including Asian jasmine, banana shrub, camellia, citrus, fatsia, fig ivy, gardenia, loquat, loropetalum, pittosporum, privet, rose, sago palm, sasanqua, star jasmine, sweet olive and wax leaf ligustrum.

It’s still too early to tell the full extent of the damage, but the best advice that I can give you is to wait and let the plants tell you what portions to cut off and what portions to leave. It’s likely that many plants will sprout back from existing stems or crowns, most at least below the snow line, and others, possibly from the ground.

Splitting stems and brown leaves indicate that those branches are dead. Swelling buds and green shoots mean that those branches are alive. Once your azaleas, roses, and other shrubs start to grow back, use hand pruners, loppers, hedge shears, or hand saws (even chain saws on larger specimens) to cut away the dead branches. Instead of daily scratching of stems and whittling away at branches, I’d personally wait until the plant clearly shows the growing portions and do all my pruning at the same time to save labor and the chance of cuttings off live stems.

After all, just because the leaves are brown, doesn’t mean the stems are dead. Loropetalum (Chinese fringe flower) is a good example of a plant where some just lost all the foliage and none of the stems. In this case, new leaves will soon cloak the bare branches and all will appear normal. Because of microclimates, all plants will be different, depending on the species, location, and how protected they were. Be patient and selective. I think most plants in our landscapes, even cut back to several feet, will easily attain the size of five gallon nursery stock by mid-summer and fall.

Once you cut your azaleas back to live wood, you can fertilize them to help them recover. The most important factor in feeding azaleas is to use small amounts per application.

Use any of the commercial granular azalea/camellia/gardenia fertilizers made for acid-loving plants and follow directions on the label. Larger plantings might find ammonium sulfate (21-0-0) more cost effective. Above all, evenly distribute the fertilizer throughout the bed, never in concentrated piles, and water in after applying (or apply before a rain) to make sure the fertilizer isn’t still on the foliage which will cause burning.

On roses and other shrubs you cut back, you can use a light sprinkling of a general lawn fertilizer like 15-5-10 or even better, one with slow release nitrogen like 28-3-12.

Greg Grant is the Smith County horticulturist for the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service. He is author of Texas Fruit and Vegetable Gardening, Heirloom Gardening in the South, and The Rose Rustlers. You can read his “Greg’s Ramblings” blog at arborgate.com, read his “In Greg’s Garden” in each issue of Texas Gardener magazine (texasgardener.com), and follow him on Facebook at “Greg Grant Gardens.” More science-based lawn and gardening information from the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service can be found at aggieturf.tamu.edu and aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu.