Kim, like some trees, many plants will lose all their leaves and enter a dormant like state until warmer weather arrives when they begin producing new growth. Plants with rhizomes will completely disappear ... leaves, then stems and nothing is left but what you think is a pot full of soil. I have a
Gloxinella lindeniana that completely disappears when it goes dormant. I can't begin to count the number of plants that I've thrown out because when there's nothing but soil showing I forget what was in the pot and thinking that something died, I just dump the contents! I remember once having a container of
Cupid's Bow (Achimenes) and I dumped the soil over the edge of my deck into a flower bed thinking the plant in the pot had died ... the next spring I kept finding little Achimenes plants popping up in that bed.
