Two weeks after Hurricane Milton blew along the Gulf coast, your landscaping still looks as if someone spray-painted half of it with chocolate milk. Your patience with waiting for regrowth has grown thinner than the stems left on your penta plants. But two people who deal with both daily are telling you to let nature take its course a little longer.

“Give it some time,” advised Ryan Czaplewski, commercial horticulture agent for the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) extension office. He suggests a couple of months of patience for slow-rebloomers among your shrubs and trees.

“We’ve seen browning on one side, some on entire trees, especially the cypress,” he said. “But cypress naturally turn brown in November or December.” The punches from Hurricanes Helene and Milton have simply ramped up the change, he explained. Queen palms also have lower wind tolerance and show the effects.

“We think a lot of it has to do with wind damage. We can’t rule out aerosol salt damage; you’ll have salt that gets in the air. We definitely think that’s an issue on some trees, especially near the coastline. There could even be abrasions from particles that get blown up, like sand or silt,” he said.

Nicholas Ewy, director of collections for the Naples Botanical Garden, agreed the wind is the first villain, with salt an accomplice. Both were made more powerful by the fact the winds were hitting shrubs and trees that had already had some drying from weeks without rain before the hurricanes. “Once you have a combination of your dry, strong winds and salty air, you’re going to get a lot of leaf burn.”

The extent of the damage depended in part on location: “If there were some buildings around them, there was some buffering and those didn’t get so much of an effect,” he said. Plants and trees that suffered some storm surge with salty water around their roots, however, are in double trouble.

Both emphasized two words: Watch. And water.

Watch: It’s months, not weeks

Think more in terms of two months, rather than two weeks, they said.

“They’ll sacrifice their leaves, but the majority of the trees that were healthy will flush back out over time. Some will flush back quicker than others,” Ewy said.

“What you want to do is let the leaves fall. It’s the plant’s natural response to stressors,” said Czaplewski. “It just may not be the prettiest December we’ll ever see, but we will get some new growth. I feel pretty positive about that. We’ll get some new growth on these plants, and they’ll be OK.”

“You might get some tip die-back on the more sensitive plants — one or two inches,” said Ewy. Those can be cut back with some discretion, but he warned that it’s “probably not a good time to be doing heavy pruning anyway, because we’re going into the winter season here.” Water: Helping the healing

Some shrubs and trees that have knocked sideways can be saved by the homeowner.

“They’re on a case-by-case basis. If it’s a little bent over — not a problem. Stand it back up,” Czaplewski said. But heavily listing trees should be entrusted to an arborist, he added.

Those that have had roots out of the ground need to re-establish them below, so generous watering is important in the first weeks. For those gardens that haven’t received a good rain, which has been much of Collier County, Ewy prescribed a spraying down of tree canopies affected by the winds to get the salt off their leaves.

Bromeliads — not all, but many, he said — can be extremely susceptible. It’s a good precautionary measure to wash out their water-holding cups to eliminate any salt. Orchids, too, can be vulnerable to salt and to any wind abrasions that might allow a bacterial infection, so those need continuing observation.

For a greener future

“Some of the invasives — Brazilian pepper and I’ve even seen some of the dodder vine, which is very invasive — show signs of stress. So that’s a little good that comes out,” Czaplewski noted. Now may be the time to tackle removing those if you can keep the dodder vine seeds from scattering and propagating new little vines.

Some plants have more resistance to wind and salt, and both Ewy and Czaplewski offered some alternative landscaping plants: Jamaican caper, with its impressive white-to-pink blooms and glossy leaves, is a good accent shrub, and cocoplums and buttonwoods — either blueor green-leaved — do well for hedges or wall plantings.

For those who lost plants and trees, the UF/IFAS Extension Office is holding its annual Yard and Garden Show in the nick of time: this weekend. There are vendors, growers, presentations and nonprofit gardening organizations, and the extension’s demonstration garden is on display with ideas for your own yard. See the info box with this story for details.