Signs of life
AKA SHORT Monday*
So, this time last week:
Those tree limbs on the left are Mme Alfred Carriere and Mme Gregoire Staechelin–which is to say slender little rose stems. Plus snow.
This used to be a garden.
So yesterday and today with the snow gone** I’ve been looking for signs of garden life. A lot of it, I have to say, isn’t. But there’s a surprising amount that is. I know, I know, people garden in Maine. There are lots of plants that will make it through a lot worse than the last fortnight here. But Hampshire plants ordinarily don’t have to.
Pansies are amazing. The ‘winter-flowering’ pansy is mostly a scam, but this is definitely a flower. In January. Which has spent the last fortnight refrigerated. It’s been hanging over the edge of its pot, all curled up and miserable, during the whiteout. And while it’s a little frosty around the edges . . . it’s a flower.
(Vicky has snowdrops. I’m jealous, but mine are only little green points so far.)
Have you ever seen anything look healthier? This is a proper spring-early-summer-flowering pansy but it’s still been sitting under a four-inch cap of snow for the last fortnight.
The long horizontal stems on the right here are my winter-flowering honeysuckle.
Which is now trying to make up for lost frozen time.
Witchhazels do have an astonishing capacity to flower despite circumstances, but this one has come out while it’s been under four inches of snow. A fortnight ago it was still buds.
On the left, the thing with the big shiny almond-shaped leaves, is one of my ‘snow? What snow?’ camellias.
And, speaking of snow-what-snow camellias . . . this is frelling Jingle Bells. It gets bigger and glossier every year and produces more really ugly flowers. But at this point I’d grieve for the loss of a friend if it packed in. Gardeners are as perverse as their plants.
And a primrose. Spring really is coming. Even if it’s only January.
* Or, my latest sad/desperate/pathetic idea about spending less time on the blog: short Mondays. Yesterday was a classic Days in the Life story. I couldn’t possibly not have told it. But could I possibly tell it SHORT? No. I don’t do short. I’m beginning to think that discovering the superphysics for thirty-hour days is more plausible than my ever learning to write short. Yet I am constrained by another zzzt-making electric fence on the other side of this issue, which is that if I drop it to less often than every day–as many, many, many bloggers^ do–the general frenzy level will drop too. And frenzy is how I get stuff done. At all.^^
^ Sane, well balanced bloggers who don’t have to trick themselves into getting stuff done.
^^ Yes. This is another of those ‘and you have ME why?’ moments.
** And may it NOT come back. Please.
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