SNOW TODAY, GONE TOMORROW?

So suddenly it snows and is cold and icy again. The problem is it limits what one can do in the garden other then prune and shift manure. What I can do is nip out with the camera -

So here are some of them - the lower garden with the pond and the shed, the view up the lower banking to the house.

The snow changes the whole garden, highlights branches and colour, conjures shapes. The dead heads of buddleia look different and sculptural.

On the ground the three toed prints of the pheasant abound, the squirrels hop prints and the characteristic rabbit spoor with the lagging feet are scattered in the upper areas.

No fox prints today - a long single file.

The cold is enough to freeze the electric gate - open not shut fortunately, but the paper is not delivered even though I salt the turn into our track.

R has a new set of pull on grips for her shoes/boots and will need to test them out.

Anyway the reintroduction of the bird feeder has produced some action, goldfinch left, chaffinch right.

No sign of any rats yet - presumably curled up somewhere snug and warm for now. I wonder if we have any hedgehogs in the sticking leaf piles though, with badgers tramping through the garden from time to time I rather doubt it as they like a juicy hedgehog.

The trouble with the snow and sun is that it is hard to stop taking photos so here are some more -

The way to the garden

South from the wood

The house from the wood

The house from the veg beds

And finally snowdrops in the snow.

LIFE BEYOND THE JAB

Yes, we have had the first dose.

The gardener cometh and we ask him to cut back all the plants between us and the far garden. This improves our view from the house and increases the amount of weak winter light coming in. Now all I have to to do is tidy a bit more and apply a liberal top dressing of compost and/or well rotted horse manure. The compost in the heap is a bit woody - a lazy old man not chopping and turning it enough.

It is strange how such an application of muck does make things look better, here around a cut back fennel with new leaves already coming on. Of course one reason it looks better is you cannot see the weeds I have been too idle to remove. This may work for annual weeds but perennial weeds will find a way though sooner or later. An then I shall mutter about creeping buttercup and broad-leaved willowherb.

A word about weather - snow falls, lies for a day then is rained away. It rained so much that a new spring appeared in the top lawn. On further investigation it is because the drains from the back field are clogged so off I go with a rake to clear them. In the morning, going out in the garden, I can hear the roar of the stream where it falls from the bottom corner into the horse paddock next door.

 

There are still a few flowers in the garden -  snowdrops in the flower beds and a lot in the woodland.  One surprise is the flowers on the Clematis armandii on the mower shed, a plant that I thought was dead after it developed a severe attack of wilt, but it has regrown after hard pruning. In the pots outside the door the little violas are looking a bit ragged but we have some flowers. There also the variegated hollies, euonymus and other shrubs. The Choisya ternata Sundance I put at the veg bed end of the main path is thriving.

           

By our back door which is at the side of the house (the front door is at the back) there is a wonderful waft of scent in the evening - from the sarcococcus I planted there just for that purpose.

It its Tuesday and rain all day. There is not a breath of wind, even the eucalyptus is motionless. Our small stream that often dries up is in spate.  I fritter the time away and find on Facebook that some twit says my life is defined by the song that was at number one on my fourteenth birthday - it is Eddie Cochran's Three Steps to Heaven - make of that what you will.

The weather is so fickle at the moment - a glorious sunrise, then a light snowfall, then rain -

A passing heron does not give the pond a second look. It is too soon for frogs who will be buried in the mud at the bottom. There seem less birds this year but I expect they have found another garden they prefer. Anyway the rain does not seem to deter the rabbits. I went out to the trail camera to see what I had captured but there was only myself going out to the trail camera to see what I had captured.

So to the snowdrops that are exploding across the garden, here on the upper banking where they will be succeeded by daffodils and primroses, then camassias and fritillaries. It brings hope of a new year in a dark month and a dark time.

With the virus I sometimes wonder how the world would be without mankind messing the place up -

AFTERWARDS

i 

Gorse, birch, bracken 

block the eye, 

sky touches land.

Views are gone -

no lake, no mountain,

no tarn, no crag.

The tree line risen,

fell now a forest,

meadow a quag.

They took the sheep, 

they did, farming ceased.

wilding the word.

Boar, lynx and wildcat

roam, eagles hunt,

beavers build dams.

ii

Then we went,

never to return,

the world recovered.

Weeds cracked concrete,

crumbled tar.

damp corroded steel.

Wilding was the word,

self-inflicted

was the way, 

Some say disease,

plastic, toxins

were the cause?

It does not matter -

on man free Earth

none say anything.

JANUARY

Why does it always seem to be 4 pm?

It is Saturday. We went for a walk and saw our first lesser celandine lighting up a hedge bottom. From my window I watch a procession of pheasants pass my window. First three plump hens, then one skinnier hen and finally a cock pheasant strutting his stuff, a bit Trump like. I am not sure if five is enough to declare I have seen a bouquet of pheasants but that is their collective noun.

A trip to the lower lawn reveals we have a disastrous problem with a large area bog. Somehow the drain we put in is not doing its job and the water is soaking into the turf, then gathering in the old, now filled in stream bed, and reemerging further down - where, in fact, I bogged down the lawn tractor.

Here and there a pearl of white signifies a snowdrop just emerging but not yet open. The year is almost stirring despite the cold and flurries of snow.

The garden is almost devoid of wildlife though a caught a pair of rabbits scooting up the bottom lawn this morning and mole hills have started to appear. Also there are other birds - a feather in a bush, I think a pigeon.

Then we have a sprinkling of overnight snow.

And now there is evidence of rabbits - tracks everywhere. And on the track to the house, tyre marks from the paper delivery, footprints and dog prints from a walker taking the bridleway.

 

And still we get spectacular sunrises.

And then we get up on Sunday and all the snow has gone. Still some ice on the pond but not a lot - that will please the moorhens. 

So what to do in the lockup, tidy the dead bits from the garden - the lemon balm is well dead. 

So I made some Covid blackcurrant jam with fruit from the freezer.

We walk the lanes, drink endless cups of tea - well, almost - I never seem to get past half a cup and throw the rest away.

Tuesday and a glorious day, morning light makes the garden glow. 

Then Wednesday and it RAINS. Sam the gardener comes clad in his waterproofs. Shifts some manure and cuts back all the dead vegetation between the house and the garden. Now we can see a long way. A bit early to do some of the buddleias but what the . . . 

R shoots out to the supermarket. I make marmalade. Well something to do on the lock up. I have also ordered some plants from Sarah Raven as I had a £10 voucher - and ended up spending much more - on cosmos, verbena, ammi and sweet peas.

I have just read a marvellous book by Leokadia Majewicz about her terrible time as a Pole exiled by Stalin to Russia as slave labour when a girl. Then I realised she was the elder sister of an old friend and artist George Kosinski who now lives in America. It is a small world sometimes. 

Finding reading matter with libraries closed is hard. Accessed Jo Nesbo's Knife via Borrow Box, a library on-line site, but could not read it as it was so depressing and we need something to cheer us up.

And just as I am about be really glum P send photos of our grandchildren in Oxford and I see snowdrops flowering on the upper banking. 

And now I notice the stream disappearing into its bed near the compost heaps. I think it is draining into the soakaway for the septic tank, well I hope it is, but it could just be running underground to emerge somewhere else, like where the ground has become a quagmire? Water has a way of insinuating itself into unwanted corners, leaking in unwanted places and generally just being a nuisance. Mind you I say that in a place where we usually have no shortage of the stuff. I might feel differently if I lived in a desert.

Waiting for a vaccination.

IT'S COLD UP NORTH

 Frost on frost, not very deep, quite crisp but not very even. Pond keep freezing over and I have been out bashing the ice for our moorhen - the ice is a good 3 cm thick now. (That is more than an inch for them what resides in Blighty.)

So, blighted with cold, blighted with viruses, blighted with Brexit - no wonder UK was called Blighty.

Here are the last cardoons - would male a good movie title? The Last Cardoons.

Just been down by old log pile pruning some roses I forgot and now I have forgotten I had toes (and fingers).

Here is the bird bath with fresh water, ice removed. The stream still runs but the pond is 95% frozen. Most wildlife in the garden is hidden, sensibly curled up somewhere warm or moved to a snugger place.

One thing this Siberian weather brings are big dawns over the bay.

Have just raked out the dead vegetation out of the banking in front of the house but above the path, thought about taking it down the compost heap and then just used it as a top dressing on shrubs lower down. I only last half an hour and then come in cold and tired out - the cold has not yet gone (or I am just old and feeble).

Manuring rose beds and roses by the path to the pond and Hilary's rose by the shed does make things look a bit better (and hides all the weeds)(which should have been removed before mulching.)

A Covid snippet - it was a lovely, if cold, sunny day today and it was a wonderful spring in 2020. It is a fact (Roger Ulrich's article in Science in 1982 I think) that people in hospital with a view of nature - trees, gardens, do much better than those with no view. That we went for a walk most days, in the lanes, parks etc, helped us get through the first wave.

 

To the garden where sun on the cherry bark and the first sign of tulips in the pots does cheer one up, even if we are in lockup yet again.

Inside the house the wonderful paperwhites are so tall they are falling over. They are underplanted with hyacinths and these will flower when the narcissi are done. A lovely present from I and A. We also got an amaryllis for Christmas and it is showing its first shoot. I have repotted our old ones but two of the three bulbs are rather small and I think will not flower this year - so feed and water and hope for next year. (Or just shove them in the garden somewhere and forget them.)

But it is cold. Yesterday we went for a walk around a local park and afterwards sat on a bench and drank coffee from a flask. Looking out over the chimney tops of the town I realised there was only one chimney with smoke coming from it! 'When I were a lad' every chimney would have been smoking (and, probably, we would not have been able to see across the park.)

We are locked up again and the drone of traffic has eased, there are no planes in the sky and this morning we were wrapped in freezing fog.

Should I go gardening? Should I light the fire? No competition there.

Cuppa, book, fire I think, until the next glorious dawn.