My beautiful Cordylines are now just 8' tall sticks

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I need some reassurance or good advice.

I've got had 4 beautiful Cordyline Australis trees that I've grown from tiny plants, growing in my garden for almost 10 years. They are about 8 or 9 feet tall and are my only significant gardening achievement.

During December and January we had seriously low temperatures, minus 10 degrees for a week or more (in Scotland) and minus zero for over a month. They were covered in snow for weeks at a time.

Once the snow and frost went away the long fronds started to fall off them, and over the last month they 3 of the 4 are completely bare and the remaining one is on it's last few fronds.

Can someone please reassure me that they will recover once the growing season starts? I'll be heartbroken if they need to be chopped down.

The same thing has happened to ours. I've had to clear wheelbarrows full of fronds from the ground. I'm hoping they will recover and start growing again.

Same thing has happened to mine although I've only got one, and it's only a couple of feet tall. It suffered last winter - I think it lost all its fronds completely - but recovered well in the spring and even sprouted new bits. I'm also hoping it'll do the same this year, although it's definitely been colder and wetter for longer this year. If they've made it to 8' tall they must be pretty tough, they sound wonderful actually! I really hope that they spring to life when the weather warms up, which it certainly is doing in the south. I'm keeping an eye on my little stick anyway.

Blimey! Can You kill them? . Mine are taking over the garden and dropping their horrible dead leaves everywhere. I guess very damp conditions will do for them?

Perhaps try phormium instead - nicer IMO and might be more tolerant of damp?

Cordylines are tolerant of frost up to a point, but may well have succumbed this winter. They are native to New Zealand (where I grew up) and generally don't grow in higher frost prone areas. (BTW, useless piece of info here but they are called cabbage trees in NZ - this is a wiki article with some magnificent specimens).

If they have lost all their leaves don't depair though because they may resprout from the base and you will end up with a multi-stemmed cabbage tree rather than a single stemmed one, so don't dig them out yet, wait and see what happens for a month or too.

I also noticed today that the bark is starting to split. Is this a sign that they are doomed?

My cordyline poked me in the eye last summer ..which resulted in a red eye for a week ..we are no longer friends

The final few fronds fell off one of ours last night, so now it is just a 10 foot stick (and the bark is all split). We are debating whether to cut it down or hope that it puts out new fronds - it looks so forlorn I can't imagine it will come back.

at all these poor cordylines. I would wait and see what happens once the weather warms up.
I have a Rhus next to my cordyline, it's a fairly dwarf variety and I only planted it in the summer; it went totally black and rotten last autumn and my mum told me to dig it up and bin it as it was dead. I ignored her 30-plus years of experience, and it sprang to life again in the spring. It's not often I ignore her advice, but I was glad I did in that case.