Cold

Like much of the country, it's cold here tonight. Lows are expected to drop to 13 with a wind chill of zero. The horses are blanketed and I brought in about 2 dozen potted plants and set them down on plastic spread on the living room floor. Cuttings and azaleas and a Vitex tree, things that were not ready to go into the ground this fall.

The Japanese apricot is about a third of the way open. Those flowers will be lost and this cold will be a test even for the buds. I would think this cold would cut short the witch hazel which has been in full bloom for about a week.

How cold is it where you are?

Winter in the garden

It's wet here. Very, very wet. Picture this kind of wet. No face plants in the mud yet, but it could happen.


So, there's been a lot of gray dreary days. Every sunny day in winter is something else entirely. The sunlight changes everything ordinary into something beautiful. All of the bare branches, twigs and stalks are transformed into shimmering patterns of light and shadow. The complexity is really difficult to capture in a photograph. Most of the time I end up with what looks like a picture of a bunch of dead twigs.

Japanese beautyberries in the back yard

Swamp sunflower stalks, rose 'Sir Thomas Lipton', rugosa alba, and beautyberries.

The spillover from the neighbor's pond into their horse pasture.

Crape myrtle and Bidens stalks

Sometimes a little of the beauty comes through though. Just when I thought the autumn show was done a few very colorful leaves remain.

Oakleaf hydrangea 'Dayspring'

The Piedmont azaleas usually have some color but they outdid themselves this year.

They even reminded me of the fothergilla that I planted next to the house this fall.

A new small Fothergilla 'Mount Airy'

Although the weather has been mild in terms of freezing, rainy days in the 40's make the cats want to stay inside. On a heating pad, of course.

Tommy goes outside more than Prissy does -- typically when I am outside -- but he's been spending a lot of time inside on the couch as well.

We still haven't ordered a second apple tree to replace the one we lost, so in the interest of research I ordered 10 varieties of apples from Tree-Mendous Fruit in Michigan. Next year I need to order the apples earlier. The taste was still there but my number one criterion for an apple is crispness and these were a little soft. Also, Tree-mendous was out of some of the apples that I wanted to try, such as 'Gravenstein'.

The hydrangea and azalea leaves aren't the only leaves left. Several roses still have leaves that turned very late. Below is a mystery China/Gallica cross nicknamed Delia's Purple.

Christmas colors

The only "snow" we might see here on Christmas would be
fluffy white seeds. Plenty of silver and gold though.

Goldenrod and broomsedge.

What's that flash of color amongst all of the brown stalks in the big bed?

The leaves of Virginia rose, which range from luminous gold

to shiny crimson, and everything in between.

A swamp cyrilla shining gold in the sun on Dec. 4th. The leaves turn pumpkin orange and then a festive shade of red if they stay on long enough. This year they made it to orange before the wind stripped them off.

In late November 2012

My wild aronias are very tall and slender and do not sport a full complement of
leaves in the fall. Their main appeal lies in their delicate white spring flowers

and the silver dappled bark. Then, very late in the year,

a few leaves turn a pure lacquered red. They look like splashes of paint.

Strawberries in Christmas green and red. I think some if not all are 'Sweet Charlie', although I am not sure of that as they produce a few berries all summer. We have strawberry shortcake for dessert every night in June until the berries run out. The recipe book that came with our bread machine has an excellent recipe for yellow cake that's perfect with strawberries.

A third to half of the leaves of these geraniums turn cardinal red in the fall. I got this purple-flowered geranium at Powell Gardens in Selma a few years ago and it's a star.

Blueberries look like a party on a bush in autumn. These are young black highbush blueberries that I grew from cuttings and planted next to the driveway.

All of the blueberries below are our wild blueberries except the one on the bottom left, which is the dwarf Southern highbush blueberry 'Sunshine Blue'. Its fruit is sweet and delicious right off the bush.

My Christmas cactus is not Christmas red, but it is blooming at Christmas time thanks to the cold spell in November. This is an actual Christmas cactus, not the much more common Thanksgiving cactus that is available in the trade in a rainbow of colors, including true red. Christmas cactus has smooth stem cactus rather than hooked ones and typically blooms in January, but not this year!

Happy holidays!