I live seventy miles south of Cleveland, Ohio. It gets cold here. Winds come right out of Chicago, miss any warming effect from the lakes, sweep down over the start of the Great Plains and hit us with a frigid smack in the face. That's how it was two winters ago. We bottomed out at -20F and it stayed that way for a few days. That's why I was astounded driving through town two summers ago when in my peripheral vision I spotted a tree in the lawn of a business that made my head snap sideways. It took a few more drives-by before I could shake that feeling of cognitive dissonance. It was indeed a fig tree that had made it through that winter.
I promised myself I would call and ask whose tree that was. Time passed and before I knew it, summer and fall were history and the bare, dead stems of that tree stood stark against yet another bone-chilling winter. I wrote off that fig. Two winters like that in a row? It probably didn't have the reserve to come back. I was wrong.
Once again that fig sprouted out of the ground. It came out as a small shrub and grew several stems to four feet or more. I resolved to get some cuttings. Autumn arrived. Leaves gave up their green, slipped their moorings and drifted to the ground. I was ready. I drove by once more, only to find that the lawn service had this year dutifully trimmed that fig to the ground. No cuttings for me!
El Nino will make this a mild winter. That tree will be back. I will be ready. I think, though a change of tactics is in order. Early on I will find the person responsible for that tree and make a friend of him (her), and then perhaps you will see one more member added to this forum and if we can't determine the identity of that fig, it will be dubbed "unk Mansfied Hardy."