If you garden in the Midwest, you live in plant hardiness zones three, four, five or six.

The broad bean has high plant hardiness; it can withstand rough climates, and in this case, cold ones.

This past winter was also a good test of plant hardiness.

An alternative means of describing plant hardiness is to use "indicator plants" (the USDA also publishes a list of these to go with the hardiness zone map).

Sable Island lies in Agriculture Canada's zone 5b for plant hardiness.

The process of elimination usually starts with plant hardiness, not so much with seed-grown plants but with nursery material.

Examples of empiric classifications include climate zones defined by plant hardiness, evapotranspiration, or more generally the Köppen climate classification which was originally designed to identify the climates associated with certain biomes.

C1 Business Digest C2 OBITUARIES A19 Polly Hill A horticulturist who stretched the boundaries of plant hardiness, she was 100.

We gardeners divide the world into zones of plant hardiness; the lower the number, the colder it gets; so to go from Zone 5, with winter lows reaching 20 below, to Zone 9, where it barely freezes, is, horticulturally speaking, tantamount to a change of planet.

Even by mercurial New England weather standards in Connecticut's plant hardiness zones 5 and 6, it was a strange winter of low snowfall and extreme temperature fluctuations.