Record-low temperatures left shrubs de-blossomed, young leaves shriveled and landscape trees tempting targets for infection.

"If they were tender, they're now black and brown," said Rachel McCormick, nursery supervisor at For Garden's Sake on N.C. 751. "Even things we tried hard to protect suffered damage."

At Architectural Trees in northern Durham County, owner John Monroe said he won't know the full extent of his losses for a while, but they could add up to thousands of dollars.

Warm weather earlier this month brought some of Monroe's exotic specimens into bud and bloom prematurely for an area where the average last-frost date is mid-April. That made two nights of sudden subfreezing weather even more damaging than it might have been.

"The trees that we could move inside, we did that," Monroe said. "But some plants were too big and we put covers on them. They were still damaged."

On the upside, most plants should recover.

"A lot of the damage is like killing flower buds or killing flowers but not killing the plants," said Michelle Wallace, horticulture agent at the Durham County Extension office. "That might reduce some sales, because [dealers] look to blooms to sell the plants."

Nurseries do expect business to suffer, for a while.

"We had a lot of plants that were in full bloom," said Bill Sparrow Jr., co-owner of Red Mill Landscape & Nursery. "Obviously, they won't be as attractive to buyers in the near term."

Rebekah Ebel at Benson Nursery on Guess Road said the freeze did a lot of damage to azalea buds, but, "They should be OK after a little while. ... Just prune off what's completely damaged and let it regrow."

For some growers, though, damage may prove more severe.

"A lot of our plants got knocked back," said Ken Walsh, nursery manager at Kiefer Landscaping on South Alston Avenue. "Whether they come back ... some of our trees, I'm really concerned about. Our grape vines really got knocked back."

At Architectural Trees, Monroe was especially worried about ambrosia beetles, a Southern pest that is attracted to plants under stress. The beetle carries a fungus on its back -- actually, a food supply -- that can fatally infect any plant the beetle bores into. A tree carefully nurtured for years may be dead in two or three days.

"That's our main worry," he said.

Should they be so inclined, growers can also worry about weather to come. Though the average frost-free date is April 12 to 15, depending on which authority one consults, four inches of snow fell on Durham on April 18, 1983, and, according to the Weather Channel's records Web site, May 8 brought a low of 28 in 1989.

"Typically for garden centers, Easter weekend is the kickstart to the season," McCormick said. For the time being, though, "We're advising our customers to wait."