Just about a week left till the big day and there’s no question it looks like winter here. The kids are on their third snow day, but even with all the winter weather I just checked the extended forecast and have the feeling there will be no white Christmas. Rain and 60F (15C) for the weekend.
But it will still look seasonal here. This year I was finally able to harvest enough evergreens and twigs from the garden to put something together for winter, and although it’s not much, it does make me feel vindicated for not bothering to trim up the yews into their traditional meatball shapes along the foundation.
Obviously I didn’t invest too much time in this display 🙂 An armful of yew trimmings, a bunch of dogwood twigs, all dropped into an empty pot with a few cheap plastic balls. For a second smaller pot, same recipe, just with sumac twigs rather than dogwood.
I really need more winter diversity. I’m looking forward to the day when I can add holly and fir and maybe a couple golden conifers and rose hips… I need to get planting!
In the meantime snowdrops will have to do. Here’s the bunch from VanEngelen all ready for covering up. There are too many for the winter garden so I’ll have to see if things thaw out enough over the weekend to bury them in a leaf pile or something outside. In the meantime they can begin rooting inside on the cool garage floor. For those who wonder about these things, out of my 200 clearance bulbs 194 looked perfect for planting. For a bulb often recommended to be purchased “in the green”, these snowdrops (elwesii) seem to have survived their dry storage just fine. I think the traditional snowdrops (nivalis) might have more of a problem with drying out.
Now if I can only get moving on a few other things, I’ve been remarkably lazy lately and spend most of my time browsing other cooler blogs!
sorta like suburbia 
Really like the use of dogwood and sumac twigs.
Thanks! I wanted to give the grape wreath a try but couldn’t find enough vines to lit one together. I’m going to have to keep my eyes open next fall
I think home-made decorations made from things out the garden are always nice. I managed to find some rosehips for decoration too. Can’t wait to see all the snowdrops flowering! 😀
Good luck with all those snowdrops!
Thanks, so far so good, and they seem to be an easy bulb to force.
Trust me, you’re not lazy! I never got to filling my whiskey barrel with greens, dogwood and other seasonal things. Now it’s frozen solid. I did make a wreath and got it hung up at last! You’ll have loads of beautiful snowdrops in the spring!
One of the reasons I used these empty pots was because all the dirt here was frozen too 🙂
Looks great! My garden looks like it has for the past month–still a ridiculous pile of leaves on top of a sheet of mud.
This cold weather sure came as a surprise didn’t it!? I was expecting slightly warmer weather at least until about now, but my plants don’t seem to care about winter clean up. I’ve missed it many a year and nothing seemed the worse for it 🙂
Your seasonal arrangements are beautiful, Frank. I much prefer simplicity and often use colourful Cornus stems myself. Never thought of using sumach but that’ll change now! How wonderful to have all these snowdrops to look forward to. They have since found out that it’s not ideal to purchase and plant in the green either. There are many myths out there in the gardening world that ought to be challenged more often, I think. 😉