Snow Day

Bitter Cold

It is 2 degrees this morning as I sit here with my cup of tea. I just peaked my head outside and yes, it feels really really cold.  And more snow is coming tomorrow! I thought we could all use a pop of color this morning. Spring and summer will come!

Winter Pots

I planted my winter pots this week, using greens from my garden and some winterberry and dogwood twigs I picked up in Pennsylvania last week. I make a grid with masking tape on the rim of the pot, and then just stick the greens through.  I wish I had some sparkly lighted twigs to stick in these pots for night-time--I just might have to look for those.  I don't do a lot of decorating outside, but I really like the natural look of these pots and the holiday color they bring to the front door.

In This Season of Waiting

In This Season of Waiting, by Linda Pastan


Under certain conditions,
when the moon in the western sky
seems frozen there, for instance

even as the sun is rising in the east,
so that soon two sides of the coin
will be facing each other;

or when the snow
which is a stranger here
fills our trees with its cold flowers;

when the single
bluejay at the feeder
is so still

it could be enameled there,
then the earth becomes an emblem
for whatever we believe.

Winter Garden

"Most people, early in November, take last looks at their gardens, are then prepared to ignore them until the spring. I am quite sure that a garden doesn't like to be ignored like this. It doesn't like to be covered up in dust sheets, as though it were an old room which you had shut up during the winter. Especially since a garden knows how gay and delightful it can be, even in the dry frozen heart of the winter, if you only give it a chance."   ~ Beverley Nichols

Snow Day

We woke up yesterday morning to a winter wonderland of snow. We finally got our big snowstorm, closing down the schools,  federal government,  libraries, canceling flights. It was an icy snow, and the plows didn't come round our neighborhood until last night. People were outside all day, though, kids playing, people shoveling, using the snowblowers. We decided that dogs have the most fun in the snow--so fun to watch them running free and playing in the snow!  We had a real crowd in late afternoon, when a car got stuck in front of our house, and the whole neighborhood turned up to help. There was another few inches of snow in the evening, and today all is calm.

Shoveling Snow, by Kirsten Dierking

If day after day I was caught inside

this muffle and hush

I would notice how birches

move with a lovely hum of spirit,

how falling snow is a privacy

warm as the space for sleeping,

how radiant snow is a dream

like leaving behind the body

and rising into that luminous place

where sometimes you meet

the people you've lost. How

silver branches scrawl their names

in tangled script against the white.

How the curves and cheekbones

of all my loved ones appear

in the polished marble of drifts.

Sunday Drive

On Sunday Walt and I took a break from painting our bedroom and took a drive out into the Virginia countryside, stopping for lunch in Purcellville and then just driving around back roads, passing through the towns of Hillsboro, Waterford, Taylorstown, Stumptown, Lucketts. We saw lots of big open land, farms, and several wineries. And we used a map~no GPS~ sometimes I just like looking at a map and seeing where we are instead of listening to that annoying voice telling me where to turn. And what if you don't know where you are going?

I didn't take many photos, but I liked how this first photo turned out. Virginia sure is pretty country, even in the winter.

Winter Fleurs

~ I must have flowers, always, and always ~ Claude Monet

Manna

Manna, by Joseph Stroud


Everywhere, everywhere, snow sifting down,
a world becoming white, no more sounds,
no longer possible to find the heart of the day,
the sun is gone, the sky is nowhere, and of all
I wanted in life – so be it – whatever it is
that brought me here, chance, fortune, whatever
blessing each flake of snow is the hint of, I am
grateful, I bear witness, I hold out my arms,
palms up, I know it is impossible to hold
for long what we love of the world, but look
at me, is it foolish, shameful, arrogant to say this,
see how the snow drifts down, look how happy
I am.

Winter Garden

After what seems like days of cooking and eating and cleaning up my kitchen, it felt good on Sunday to get outside in the yard and in my garden. While everyone else in our neighborhood was putting up Christmas lights and reindeer on their roofs, we finished raking and mulching what I hope are the last of the leaves, and I emptied a few remaining pots. I did some major cleanup in the front garden, cutting back a lot of perennials that I often leave over the winter, but I was just in the mood to work so I decided to keep cutting and raking. Down with the anemones, peonies, asters, phlox. The more I do now, the less work in the spring, right?  I did leave the sedums and baptisia for now. And then there's the back yard...

The garden looks so bare and gray this morning.  Now it just needs a nice layer of pretty snow.

And just so we remember, here's what this front garden looked like in June.

Later in the afternoon, I went to Merrifield  because this weekend was their Holiday Open House and I wanted to see if they had any unusual holiday garden decorations.  They have really beautiful greens and wreaths and I picked up some greens and some poinsettias for the house. I am wanting to try an outdoor pot with greens, using branches from my yard, but I picked up a few specialty greens (winterberry, cedar lime, and some firs), so we'll see how that turns out.

Snowquester

Out my kitchen window

Woohoo, I have been waiting for snow all winter long, and today we are finally getting a real snowstorm. Those crazy weather people in metro DC have named this storm 'Snowquester.'  Aren't they so funny. All schools are closed, the federal government is closed, but guess what,  Fairfax County libraries are open, hmmm, no surprise there. Luckily they have something called liberal leave, which many of us are using today instead of trekking into work. It's really not too bad right now, but it is supposed to snow heavily all day long, so hopefully we will get a good snowfall by the end of the day. 

And of course I bundled up already this morning and went out to take some pictures of my snowy garden. It's a very wet snow, so we are worried about trees and shrubs breaking, and power outages. It sounds like there are already lots of power outages in Virginia.  It is really coming down right now, and because we are warm and cozy in our house, I am hoping it snows all day long. The other day at the library I was talking to a customer about the impending snowstorm, and she said she too was hoping we would get a lot of snow. I asked her where she was from, and she grew up in Cleveland!

Winter Gardens

"From December to March, there are for many of us three gardens: the garden outdoors, the garden of pots and bowls in the house, and the garden of the mind's eye."

~Katherine S. White, 1892-1977, garden writer, editor at The New Yorker, and wife of E.B. White

My winter garden indoors

My winter garden outdoors

The winter garden in my mind (image via Pinterest)

Get On With It: Winter in the Garden

I feel like I got my ass kicked this morning, after reading an article in today's Post by garden writer Adrian Higgins.  Instead of lamenting the fact that we've had such a lousy winter, he wrote about how we should count our blessings and use our mild winter to "get stuff done" and start preparing the garden for spring plantings.  I particularly loved his description of his own temperature activity table for winter gardening:

"In the teens, don't get out of bed. Twenties: Fuss with seeds indoors. Thirties: Bundle up and and do what you must in the garden. Forties: Bundle up and go get 'em. Fifties: You're in clover; make a day of it."

Because our ground is not frozen, there is a lot we can do in the garden, including pruning shrubs and trees, weeding, edging, cleaning up and straightening paths, reworking a bed to prepare for new plantings. The more we can do now the easier our spring chores will be. I need to be reminded that every time I pull a weed now that is one less weed to pull in the spring.  And as I sit here looking out the window I can see lots of things I can do, so maybe I better forget about that winter hiatus and get back out in the garden.