2024 AND TREES

 So here we are in 2024 and it is still raining, floods in the fields and squelch across the garden. At least we have survived the festive season, just.

I have just found how difficult it is to type accurately when having the hiccoughs, am stil findin it ard.

The garden is best left alone at the moment perhaps to avoid damage - when it is so wet.

So a bit on trees, big trees. These I photographed on our last visit to Holker Hall, big trees are amazing things.

 

There is something about trees, especially the trunks, that is majestic.

The big ones are all older than I can ever be and much more attractive than I could be as a skeleton - the spread of branches, the strength of the trunk.

I look at the wrecked garden and decide to stay in the house. Where it is warm. If the oil man ever delivers.

So the last year sprawls into the new, what was going on is still going on - very depressing.

Then it is twelfth night, well day, and the decorations are down - AND the sun is shining - and it is not raining.

We went to the garden centre in Beetham today, really for a coffee, but ended up buying a big pot in which to dump all the weedy amaryllis I have around the house, a christmas rose for R and a female skimmia for our lonely male skimmia.

I will really need to get out there and tidy away the debris.

There is still colour on the liquidambar despite broken branches and the viburnum is flowering as is the winter flowering honeysuckle.

And we have one rose flower and the beginnings of rhubarb. It is a month of silhouettes and shapes. Not all the world is asleep - the moles are hard at work messing the lawn.

Then there are the stirring snowdrops bringing hope in the dark days.

The sun shines and lifts then whole mood of the garden even though we are in frosty weather.

When we were in lockdown with the Covid the blue sky was untarnished by contrails - alas no longer - 

Roll on spring.