In Pennsylvania’s USDA hardiness range of 5a to 7b, the short answer is reassuring: of the 65 landscape Trees, Shrubs and Perennials this site documents, every single one survives winter somewhere in the state, and 59 of them survive everywhere in it. The real question isn’t what dies here, it’s which six plants only work in part of the state, and which part is yours.
What will not survive a winter in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania’s hardiness range runs from zone 5a in the northern tier and the higher Alleghenies down to zone 7b along parts of the southeastern corner near Philadelphia. That’s a wide spread for one state, wide enough that a plant can be perfectly hardy in Erie and struggle in Bucks County, or the reverse. But when you cross that full 5a-7b range against the 65 plants tracked on this site, the result is flat: none of them are unhardy across the entire state. Zero.
That’s worth sitting with for a second, because most state-by-state guides you’ll find lead with a scare story about tender plants that can’t take the cold. Pennsylvania doesn’t hand you one. Every tree, shrub, fruiting plant and perennial on this list has a home somewhere within the Keystone State’s borders. The plants that struggle here don’t fail because of raw cold tolerance across the board, they fail in specific slices of the range, which is a completely different problem and the subject of the next section.
It’s worth being precise about what “hardy” actually measures before moving on. The USDA hardiness system is built on one number: the average annual extreme minimum winter temperature a location experiences. A plant rated hardy for a given zone is rated to survive that cold, not to thrive in whatever summer comes with it. The warm end of a plant’s range is frequently a heat limit rather than a cold one, a species can be listed as hardy in zone 7b and still sulk through a hot, humid Philadelphia summer even though it never freezes to death. Survival and comfort aren’t the same test, and this page is only answering the survival one.
None of this means every plant does equally well in every Pennsylvania garden. Soil, drainage, exposure and microclimate all shape how a plant actually performs once it’s rooted in, and those factors get their own treatment further down this page. What the zero-failure result does tell you is that a Pennsylvania gardener isn’t choosing between “will it live” and “will it die” for these 65 species, the choice is closer to “where in the state will it live,” which is exactly the layered, three-part answer that follows.
For context, that’s a meaningfully different starting point than a state with a genuinely tropical or genuinely arctic range, where an entire category of plants gets ruled out before you even open a catalog. Pennsylvania’s spread is wide, but it’s a temperate spread, and the plants documented here were largely selected because they suit that kind of climate in the first place.
The plants that work in part of the state and not the rest
Six plants on this site’s list fall into the middle bucket: hardy somewhere in Pennsylvania, not hardy everywhere in it. This is the group a statewide guide actually needs to get right, because a single yes-or-no verdict on any of these six would be correct for one part of the state and wrong for another.
Two of the six run into trouble at the state’s colder end. Hydrangea macrophylla, the common bigleaf hydrangea, isn’t hardy in zones 5a or 5b, the northern tier and the higher elevations of the Alleghenies. Lagerstroemia indica (crape myrtle) and Magnolia grandiflora (southern magnolia) share that exact same gap: both are excluded from 5a and 5b as well. All three do fine from zone 6a on down toward the state’s mild southeastern edge.
Two others run into trouble at the warm end instead. Syringa vulgaris, common lilac, is excluded only from zone 7b, meaning it’s fine across nearly the whole state and only struggles in that warmest southeastern sliver. Weigela florida has a slightly wider warm-end gap, excluded from both 7a and 7b.
The sixth plant, Ficus carica (common fig), has the narrowest window of the group. It’s excluded from 5a, 5b, 6a and 6b, which leaves it reliably hardy only in the state’s 7a and 7b zones, essentially the Philadelphia-area edge of Pennsylvania and little else.
| Plant | Excluded from | Works in this state’s |
|---|---|---|
| Hydrangea macrophylla | 5a, 5b | 6a-7b |
| Lagerstroemia indica | 5a, 5b | 6a-7b |
| Magnolia grandiflora | 5a, 5b | 6a-7b |
| Syringa vulgaris | 7b | 5a-7a |
| Weigela florida | 7a, 7b | 5a-6b |
| Ficus carica | 5a, 5b, 6a, 6b | 7a-7b |
Notice the pattern: three plants avoid the cold end, two avoid the warm end, and one is squeezed into only the warmest corner of the state. The facts here name which zones each plant fails in, not why, so treat this as a map to check yourself against, not a biology lesson.
Finding your own zone within that 5a-7b range means checking a county-level hardiness map rather than relying on the statewide range alone. This site’s insulation and climate page for Pennsylvania carries that county-level zone picture, and it’s the fastest way to see whether you’re gardening at the state’s cold edge, its warm edge, or somewhere comfortably in between.
The soil and the summer they will be planted into
The soil USDA lists as representative of Pennsylvania is the Hazleton series, an Inceptisol, which is a technical way of saying it’s a relatively young soil that hasn’t developed strong internal layering yet. Its surface runs strongly acid, with a pH around 4.6, and texturally it sits in loam-to-silt territory: about 46 percent sand, 42 percent silt and 12 percent clay, with organic matter around 3.0 percent. It’s classified well drained.
For a woody plant, drainage matters more than almost anything else in that description. Winter wet, not winter cold, kills more shrubs and perennials than a hard freeze ever does, because saturated soil around a root system in cold weather suffocates roots that a well-drained soil would have let breathe. A well-drained, loam-to-silt soil like this gives roots room to establish without sitting in standing water after a heavy rain or a spring thaw.
The acid surface pH is also worth flagging, since several of the shrubs hardy across this entire state, Kalmia latifolia (mountain laurel), Ilex glabra (inkberry) and Fothergilla gardenii among them, are acid-loving species that suit ground like this rather than fighting it. That said, the Hazleton series is the soil USDA maps as representative of the state, not a description of any one backyard. Fill dirt, river-bottom ground and anything a builder has graded can differ completely, and a home soil test is still the only way to know your own number.
Summer rainfall at the reference station runs about 12.7 inches across June, July and August, out of 44.1 inches for the year. June is the driest of the three summer months at 4.04 inches, followed by August at 4.29 and July at 4.38. That’s a meaningful amount of rain, but it’s a precipitation total, not a humidity reading and not a watering schedule on its own.
What it means depends on the ground it lands on. On the well-drained Hazleton-type soil described above, that same rain moves through the profile relatively quickly rather than pooling, so a newly planted shrub or tree can dry out between rain events even in a summer that logs over 12 inches. On a heavier clay soil elsewhere in the state, the same inch of rain sits longer and drains slower. The rainfall number and the soil number have to be read together, not separately, and a rain gauge on your own property is what actually settles how a given summer is behaving.
When to plant, here
At the reference station, the last spring frost falls between March 29 and April 6, and the first fall frost arrives between November 5 and November 16. Those dates bracket two distinct planting windows, and the choice between them comes down to one question: how much time does the plant need to grow roots before it’s asked to either leaf out or face a freeze?
A spring planting gives roots a full growing season to establish before winter, but it also asks a young plant to push new growth right as summer heat and dry spells arrive, which can stress a plant that hasn’t built out its root system yet. A fall planting lets the plant settle into cooling, often wetter soil with less top growth to support, using the weeks before the ground freezes to establish roots quietly.
| Window | Best suited to | Main risk |
|---|---|---|
| Spring (after March 29-April 6) | Plants that need a full season to establish before their first winter | Late-spring cold snap, then summer heat stress on a shallow root system |
| Fall (before November 5-16) | Trees and shrubs with time to root before hard freeze | Not enough weeks left for root establishment if planted late |
The catch is that these windows aren’t the same size everywhere in the state. In the coldest part of Pennsylvania’s range, the northern tier and the higher Alleghenies, fall arrives two to four weeks earlier than at the reference station near Philadelphia, which shortens the fall planting window considerably. A shrub planted there in late October has far less time to root before the ground locks up than one planted the same week near Philadelphia.
It’s also worth remembering these are averages built from 1991-2020 climate normals at one reference station, not a guarantee for any specific year or any specific corner of the state. A frost can arrive early or late relative to the average, and a garden on a hilltop or in a low frost pocket will run its own local calendar.
Whichever window you plant in, water through that entire first growing season regardless of what a plant’s mature drought tolerance suggests. Drought ratings describe established plants with root systems that reach deep and wide; a plant in its first season hasn’t built that yet, no matter how tough it will eventually become.
Where to read about each one
Fifty-nine of the 65 documented plants are hardy across all of Pennsylvania’s 5a-7b range, and they cover every category a Pennsylvania garden typically draws from. Among the trees: Acer rubrum and Acer saccharum, Quercus alba and Quercus rubra, Cornus florida, Cercis canadensis, Betula nigra, Nyssa sylvatica, Ginkgo biloba and Tilia americana among them. Among the shrubs: Kalmia latifolia, Ilex glabra, Ilex verticillata, Clethra alnifolia, Fothergilla gardenii, Physocarpus opulifolius, Hydrangea paniculata and Buxus sempervirens. Among the perennials: Echinacea purpurea, Rudbeckia fulgida, Baptisia australis, Monarda didyma, Phlox paniculata and Salvia nemorosa. Fruiting plants hardy statewide include Vaccinium corymbosum and V. angustifolium (blueberries), Asimina triloba (pawpaw), and several bramble and cane fruits like Rubus idaeus and R. occidentalis.
The six plants covered above in the partial-range section, Hydrangea macrophylla, Syringa vulgaris, Weigela florida, Lagerstroemia indica, Magnolia grandiflora and Ficus carica, remain worth growing, just with your specific zone checked first rather than assumed.
The hardiness ranges behind every plant named on this page come from the North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox, a university extension plant database, crossed here against Pennsylvania’s own 5a-7b USDA range. These are hardiness ranges specifically, describing survival through winter cold, and they’re a separate measure from the adaptation zones used elsewhere on this site for apple varieties, which come from a different fruit-variety table and answer a different question entirely.