Seedfork, remember that the trend from EV to Dor is a sliding scale. SEV's ARE the sliding scale. There is almost no way to determine the evergreen-ness or dormancy of a SEV without growing it in your own particular climate.
I research the parentage of plants that I'm interested in to try to establish whether or not they will thrive here. One issue is that a lot of the hybridizers simply label their plants as SEV without any effort to establish the actual type of foliage. Many, in fact, use SEV as a marketing tool. I won't comment again on those that don't provide parentage, so it's a crap shoot whether or not their SEV's will grow in a southern garden.
With your location, you should be able to grow some dormants. The only advice I can offer is to focus your attention on hybridizers in the southern half of the country, rather than the northern half. That should work pretty fine for you and still gives you a large pool of plants from which to pick.
