What Does Freeze Damage Look Like, and When Should I Prune It?

UF/IFAS describes three ways cold hurts plants, and they explain why damage can look so uneven across one yard.

• Chilling injury happens to tropical plants above freezing, sometimes as warm as 50 degrees.
• Frost happens on clear, calm nights. Leaves can drop to 32 degrees or below while the air is warmer, so damage is often spotty.
• A hard freeze comes with wind and cools the whole plant evenly below 32 degrees.

Plants that cooled off slowly over a few weeks often handle cold better than plants hit by a sudden drop.

• Leaves turn bronze or brown, wilt, or burn at the tips and edges. Damage is often worst at the branch tips.
• Soft stems on plants like bananas turn brown and mushy.
• Bark on some trees can split after a severe freeze.
• No spring growth on part or all of a plant can be the first sign of damage you notice.
• Delayed damage. On citrus, trunk damage can be severe while the leaves look fine, and it can take months to show.

A simple check is the scratch test. Scrape a little bark with your fingernail. Green underneath means the stem is alive. Brown or black means that part is likely dead.

Our guide to whether a tree is dead or just dormant covers the scratch test in more detail, and why one brown twig is not the whole story.

It is natural to want the brown leaves gone. UF/IFAS advice is to wait. As one UF horticulture professor put it, you cannot tell how much damage has been done until the plant starts new growth in the spring.

There are two reasons. Cutting now can take off wood that would have lived. And the dead leaves and stems help shield the living parts from the next cold night.

Around Tampa Bay, UF/IFAS extension offices in Pasco and Hernando put the end of frost season at roughly late February to mid-March. When in doubt, wait for new growth and cut back to it. The exception is wet, mushy tissue, which can be cleaned up sooner.

Hold off on extra water and fertilizer. UF/IFAS extension advises against trying to speed recovery with extra water, and against fertilizing before spring growth starts, since tender new shoots are easy to hurt in the next cold snap. When it is time to prune trees, our tree pruning page covers how we make the cuts, and when to trim trees in Florida covers timing through the year.

Palms have one growing point, called the bud, just below the spear leaf, the new leaf that has not opened yet. If the bud dies, the palm dies. That is why the advice for palms is a little different.

• Leave the brown fronds for now. UF/IFAS says not to remove cold-damaged leaves until the risk of more cold has passed, because they help insulate the bud.
• Check the spear leaf. The base of the spear is one of the least cold-hardy parts of a palm. Weeks after a freeze it may pull out easily, with a mushy base and a bad smell, as rot moves in.
• If it pulls out, removing it may help the area dry, and a copper fungicide drench may help slow rot. UF/IFAS notes neither has been scientifically tested. If the spear holds firm, the bud has likely survived.
• Watch the trunk. After a long cold spell, soft, sunken, reddish spots can show up on the trunk months later. On queen palms, look for vertical cracks with sap leaking.
• Expect odd new leaves. The first new fronds after a freeze may have clipped tips or brown patches, because they were damaged before they opened. Later fronds are usually normal.

UF/IFAS also notes, as an observation rather than a tested result, that heavily trimmed palms seem to fare worse in cold. That is one more reason to leave green fronds on. Our plant health care page covers the fertilizing and treatment side of palm recovery.

Our field note on why palms die covers bud rot after a freeze, the copper drench UF/IFAS describes, and why I would not count on colloidal silver.

Pinellas is mostly surrounded by water and is often milder than inland counties, but a hard freeze can still reach us some winters. These are plants UF/IFAS extension agents in nearby counties have named as hurt by freezes.

• Palms: coconut, royal, foxtail, Christmas, bottle, and areca palms are tropical and the most at risk. Pygmy date palms are hardy to about 30 degrees and can lose some fronds. Queen palms can be damaged when it drops into the teens.
• Shrubs and tropicals: croton, copperleaf, ti plant, schefflera, fiddleleaf fig, clusia, and Xanadu philodendron. Bananas, bird of paradise, and tropical fruit trees also take damage.
• Lawn: Floratam St. Augustine, the most common lawn grass in the area, is the most cold sensitive of the common lawn grasses.

The sabal palm is rarely hurt by cold here. In a February 2026 freeze on the east coast, Canary Island date, Washingtonia, Bismarck, and queen palms came through in Brevard County while the tropicals did not.

• Plant tender things in sheltered spots, near the house or under a tree canopy, which UF/IFAS says can improve survival.
• Keep palms fed. Routine palm fertilization improved cold tolerance in coconut palms in a UF study.
• Cover what you can with frost cloth on nights a hard freeze is forecast.
• Shade from early morning sun may reduce bark splitting on some woody plants after a freeze, according to UF/IFAS.