I found MD to be a little hit or miss for me in my climate. I have them all over the place and all planted within a month or so of each other.

Before planting, they did not take the summer heat with delayed UPS trucks and many arrived DOA while plants of a different variety were fine.

After winter, none of them died completely, but I have some that are now only inches tall (after dying down to the ground) in the same line where some are three feet tall and stayed green the entire winter. But the ones that came out the worse are the ones that went into winter looking the worse, though everything else was the same.

The ones in clay really struggled to get started last year but this year I don't see a difference between the clay and the sandy soil ones. But the main thing that I learned was that MD (in my particular circumstances) does not like too much water and I had some planted by very thirsty Austins!

So if I would have known this starting out, perhaps the clay ones would have done better to begin with? If there's a heavy rain, MD looks unhappy and will get a bit of BS.

Mine are all planted in full sun or else getting a lot of sun, none that I would consider shaded. I have one in a pot that has just been sitting there for six months, not a lot of growth, so being brought in for the cold and having the water controlled seems to still result in a slow starting plant.

That being said, I have at least a dozen that have huge blooms and stayed green all winter. If these were the only ones that I owned, I would say that they are fabulous! But then I have a lot that are incredibly behind so maybe they are just slow starters?

For winter protection, they had a manure and shavings mix banked around them.