That's great. Did you have an unusually mild winter? Up until Feb we were having an exceptionally mild winter with temps at least 20 degrees above normal everyday. Unfortunately that all changed in Feb when we ended up with record cold temps. Many of my hardy plants suffered damage because of our screwy weather this past winter.
Karyn

It was not particulary mild, but no snow or temperatures way below freezing for any period of time. What seems to do in the more marginal plants is the week or two of deep freeze we sometimes get in January.

Or the lack of a decent thunderstorm in June!

e

Two years ago I planted a vitifolia on the south face of my house, fairly protected. It made it through the winter, but barely. We had only light freezes in zone 8b central Texas, and temps rarely stayed below freezing for more than a day at a time. So in the spring I uprooted it and potted it up, where it's done significantly better (our heavy clay soil didn't agree with it very much).

It's a good thing I potted it--this past winter we had a spate of harder freezes, including an ice storm which had everything heavily frosted for the better part of a week. The vitifolia wouldn't have survived that. I did lose a big flavicarpa. My caerulea, however, shrugged off the ice without losing a leaf. Go figure!