Bonsai Pots and Overwintering

[DLFielding]

I recently received an outdoor Bonsai in a glazed ceramic pot as a gift. The instructions state to simply leave
it outside in a protected area over the winter months. I'm concerned the pot will not survive.

Here in Zone 5 (New York) it gets very cold during the winter. Are bonsai pots designed to withstand extremely
cold temperatures?

I'm concerned about ending up with a bonsai and a collection of pieces of broken pot in the Spring.

I've read suggestions to bury/mulch the pot to protect the bonsai tree. This will not reduce the freezing action
at -15 degrees.

Thanks in advance for the help.

[tomc]

I used to slip the few hearty trees I had in ceramic pots into a slightly bigger plastic pot before bedding them in an unheated cold frame for the winter, in Lakes region of NH.

Mostly I pot mine up in mica pots that have traditional shapes, but won't shatter in the cold.

Nesting your tree a little way into soil and covering them with leaf mulch worked for me before I built my cold house.

[rainbowgardener]

It isn't really the cold that destroys ceramics so much as the freeze/thaw cycles, expansion and contraction, water getting into tiny cracks and then expanding when it freezes. If you can protect it from all that, sheer cold should be OK.

[tomc]

Ceramic pots spaul (flake) with frost, Much less common is the soil to expand with frost and split pots, but it can happen.