Wordless Wednesday: The backyard in winter

The January sun(s)

Here we are in almost mid-January and I can just about count the hours of sunshine that we've had this month on the fingers of my two hands. It's a gray, dreary, foggy, misty, rainy, chilly, cloud-covered month of depressing sameness so far. The only suns that my garden has seen lately are these two.

This Talavera sun hangs on the fence in the sitting area in the front yard, under my beloved red oak tree.

This metal sun overlooks my backyard garden and brings a bit of cheery color to these gray days.

Winter has, in fact, arrived here at long last. Our daytime temperatures are in the 40 degrees F., a bit too chilly to be entirely comfortable sitting outside for long periods. On the night of January 7, we finally had a REAL frost when the thermometer hit 30 degrees F. That's still our low temperature for the season so far.

But if winter has finally come to my yard, the birds most definitely have not.

In past winters, by mid-January this feeder in my front yard would have been swarmed by American Goldfinches, Pine Siskins, Northern Cardinals, Chipping Sparrows, etc. Not this year. I wasn't really expecting siskins this winter, but WHERE ARE THE OTHERS? I've never experienced such an absence before. It is a very worrying phenomenon. Rachel Carson, in 1962, wrote about a Silent Spring that would come if we didn't make changes in our farming practices. I'm experiencing a silent winter, for reasons that I don't understand, and I don't like it one little bit.

    

The garden in January

January 7. We are two-and-a-half weeks into winter and my garden still has not seen a killing frost. Some gardens in the area have already been bitten back by cold weather, but mine has hardly been touched. Only the tops of some of the tender perennial shrubs, like Hamelia, show damage.

On several occasions, including again this week, the weatherman has predicted that we would get temperatures in the 20s F. during the night, but so far the lowest temperature registered by my Min/Max thermometer (which records the highest and lowest temperatures of the day) has been 34 degrees F. Now they are telling us that - for sure this time! - we'll have temperatures in the 20s over the next few nights. We'll see.

The mild weather has produced some interesting effects in the garden.

It's not often - well, never, really - that I've had prairie coneflowers blooming in January. 

Nor have I ever seen volunteer cosmos blooming on January 7 before.

The Copper Canyon daisies, a very tender perennial usually long gone by now, are still in bloom.

And so is the yellow cestrum. It blooms most months of the year but usually takes a rest in January and February. 

And the butterflies are taking advantage of those blooms. I have more butterflies than cardinals in my yard right now and that's just wrong! It certainly doesn't help my bird count for Project FeederWatch.

Even the wax begonias in pots around the garden are still in bloom.

As are the milkweed plants.

The kumquats, on the other hand, are not an anomaly. They are supposed to be ripe now and they are. And they are delicious. 

Now this is a bloom that I've never seen before. I've had this fatsia in the garden for a few years but it's never bloomed. Perhaps the mild winter has encouraged it to burst forth - or maybe it's just been biding its time in those previous years. For whatever reason, here it is.

 

So, is it the effect of global warming or is this simply a normal fluctuation in our weather? Mild winters are the norm for us here in Southeast Texas, but we've lived here for twenty-seven years and I can never remember wax begonias blooming outside in January!

Winter

"The shortest day has passed, and whatever nastiness of weather we may look forward to in January and February, at least we notice that the days are getting longer.  Minute by minute they lengthen out.  It takes some weeks before we become aware of the change.  It is imperceptible even as the growth of a child, as you watch it day by day, until the moment comes when with a start of delighted surprise we realize that we can stay out of doors in a twilight lasting for another quarter of a precious hour."

-  Vita Sackville-West

The snowy woods

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

BY ROBERT FROST

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

Wordless Wednesday: Winter

Winter in my heart

Mid-January is a difficult time for gardeners. On many days, the weather is too inclement to actually get outside and work in the garden, even in the relatively mild climate where I live. Many gardeners resort to dreaming and planning over the colorful seed catalogs that fill our mailboxes at this time of year. Others read books or draw up complicated plans for new beds and other additions and improvements they will make to their gardens. But by mid-January, I'm well-past all of that and looking for new ways to entertain myself. I'm looking for signs of the coming spring, something to relieve the winter that has settled over my heart. Slowly, I'm finding a few of those signs.

Yesterday, a beautiful sunny mid-winter day, I found a green anole who was spread out, sunning himself atop the outdoor air-conditioning unit. I hadn't encountered any of these little lizards since our latest freeze and it made me smile to see him there.

Walking around the yard, I saw that the old hydrangeas had weathered the freeze and now have green buds. Likewise, my ancient apple tree has fat buds that look as though they are just waiting for the signal to open up. Near the tree, I encountered a hopeful honeybee, but there's not much blooming in my yard right now to tempt him. There are a few premature blossoms on the blueberries, so perhaps he found them to give him sustenance for another day.

On another recent day in the yard, I met a Question Mark butterfly on the Carolina jessamine. The jessamine hasn't bloomed yet, although it, too, is full of buds, but the butterfly had settled on the south side of the vine, away from the cold wind and was spreading its wings in the sun. My yard is full of butterflies in summer and fall, but it seemed odd to see this little critter there on such a cold day. These butterflies, though, are actually active in winter here, something to brighten our gardens and give us hope - just as the apple tree and hydrangea buds, the blueberry blossoms, the honeybee and the anole do. Something to remind us that spring will arrive in its own good time to relieve the winter in our hearts.

Iguanas and pythons and turtles, oh my!

The deep freeze that has hit virtually all parts of the southern United States over the last several days has wreaked havoc on the citrus crop in Florida. It has also caused a lot of misery for wildlife in the area that is not used to such cold temperatures. That's not all bad though.

Florida has been a fertile ground for the growth and expansion of invasive species. Two members of the reptile family in particular have caused great concern in recent years - the iguana which can sometimes grow up to six feet long and the Burmese python which can reach lengths of 20 feet and pose a threat not only to wildlife but to domestic pets and to humans. The state's wildlife service has been working to trap and euthanize these potentially dangerous animals. The cold has suddenly made their jobs a lot easier.

The cold temperatures cause the iguanas to become torpid and fall out of the trees they have climbed. They can then be picked up and euthanized. The pythons as well go into an almost catatonic state when exposed to these cold temperatures. So although the citrus farmers might have a hard time seeing it, it seems that the Arctic blast may actually have a silver lining for Florida.

Unfortunately, another member of the reptile family, sea turtles, some of which are already endangered, are also adversely affected by the cold. Some have had to be rescued and moved to cover until the cold abates. Others probably have perished in the unexpected cold.

This is the kind of weather that helps to sort out those species that don't belong from the native species that do belong here. It will be interesting to see what will be the long-term effects of actually having winter weather in the South once again.

We're havin' a heat wave!

Well, actually, strictly speaking, we in the northern hemisphere are NOT having a heat wave. In fact, throughout much of our half of the earth, it is bitterly cold just now. In my own neighborhood of the world, here near the southern coast of the United States, we are shivering in temperatures that we haven't experienced in many years. We are talking temperatures in the 20s F and possibly as low as the teens later this week.

Such weather occurrences predictably bring out all the global warming skeptics and deniers to chortle triumphantly about how this proves that all the hoopla about global climate change is a hoax or a conspiracy. But if they bothered to turn their eyes to the south, they would see quite a different picture.

In the southern hemisphere, especially the South Pacific, many areas are experiencing unprecedented heat waves, not so different from what we experienced in much of North America and other parts of the northern hemisphere just a few months ago and probably will again next summer. But we tend to be so ethnocentric that we assume that whatever weather conditions we are experiencing at the moment are the ones that prevail over the earth. And so we overlook half the planet.

Of course, it isn't only in regard to weather that we are so blind and jingoistic. We tend to see OUR culture or OUR political system or OUR religion as THE culture, political system, religion, etc. In this, perhaps we are no better than those who willfully and proudly deny, in the face of all the data, that the earth is heating up. We are all in the same boat and the water is rising.

Winter in the garden

Winter officially begins in a couple of days as the sun hides its face from us on the shortest day of the year. But unofficially, it began here a couple of weeks ago with our first severe freeze. We don't often get temperatures that flirt with the teens here on the Gulf Coast, and so that event was a shock to the systems of both gardens and gardeners.

Walking around my garden today, I was again surprised at the extent of the damage. Most of my plants are natives, or they are tried and true old Southern stand-bys like crinums. They will be back. But I had succumbed to the temptation to add some more tropical plants this year. Many gardeners in the Houston area grow them successfully, but I'm a bit farther north and the micro-climate of my yard is a bit chillier at this time of year than many of those who treasure and baby their tropical plants.

I don't baby my plants. I'm much too lazy a gardener for that. So this season has already been a revelation to me - even though it hasn't officially begun yet. That revelation is: Stick to native plants! They are tough and they know how to survive these little unexpected blips in our usually warm (or hot) climate.

In recent years, winter has barely even touched us here and perhaps we have been lulled into a false sense of security. But Mother Nature still has the capacity to surprise us. As I look at those sumptous tropical plants offered by local nurseries next spring, I'll try to remember that.

The winter garden

Winter came early to the Gulf Coast this year. We had our earliest snowfall on record, on December 4, and our first hard freeze came that night, about a week to ten days earlier than our average first frost. This was a shock to area gardeners, most of whom were unprepared for this strangely cold weather. (Our temperature got down to 23 degrees F.) In recent years, winter has passed practically unremarked in our gardens. Last winter, the first week in January, I had seven fat Monarch butterfly caterpillars munching away on my still green milkweed. This winter, the first full week in December, my milkweed has turned to black mush.

Perversely, I actually enjoy this time of year in the garden. It may have something to do with the fact that weeding requirements are minimal, but I like to think that my pleasure is more spiritual, related to the revelation of the bones and structure of the garden. All the fluffery of leaves has been peeled away by Mother Nature and one can see through to the very skeleton which holds the garden together.

The garden is quiet and mostly monochrome these days. Gone is the colorful frenzy of butterflies and bees feeding that has been the hallmark of the garden since mid-summer. No green anoles sun themselves on brick or stone or wooden fence. Even the birds go about their activities quietly. And the gardener can sit and look and think without distractions, planning for more colorful days to come - in the new year just ahead.

(Read more about my garden at my other blog, Gardening with Nature.)