Day 46, year 2 - Winter daisies.
Its easy to look at the broad sweep of a landscape and see the beauty within it. We’re wired for a connection to the land and for finding landscape beautiful on the large scale.
Sometimes though, if you look closely in unexpected places, like nestling in a sunny spot between the roots of a lime tree, you can find a beautiful little treasure. Its had sub-zero temperatures. Its been buried beneath inches of snow. And yet somehow these plucky little daisies are still blooming in January!
If you’re only looking at the large scale you can miss the little surprises. If you look at the large scale and don’t think there is beauty within it - in a town or city, perhaps - then you can miss the little pockets of surprising beauty….like daisies blooming in January on an average suburban street.
Keep your eyes open, look and truly see, and you never know what you might discover.
Day 45, year 2 - The final fling.
The end of the snow days are here, but not before they had a final fling in my corner of the shire, with a big snowfall (a foot deep in places) that then turned to rain and melting as soon as it was done. By the afternoon the sun was warming up and making the snow on the rooftops glow, as if it wanted to send it off looking its best.
Day 41 - The fading.
Its a strange thing, temperature. The experts assured us that it would barely creep above freezing in the little corner of my shire today, and yet when the sun painted its way through the clouds there was melting, fading of the snow that had already shrunk in overnight frosts.
Its patchy, this fading, which makes me wonder even more about temperature. Why will it melt on the stone ground, but not on the stone walls, even when the sun was making it sparkle and glow. Melting in shadows, remaining in the sun….its a curious mystery that I can’t stop myself speculating about.
Day 40, year 2 - The snow goes ever on and on.
It started again around 3am and simply kept on coming all day. Winter reigns supreme and there’s not even a hint of it getting any more than a degree above freezing for days.
It does only take a few days to see through snow and see what its game is. I’m on to you, snow. I know that really you’re just rain in a posh frock….
Day 39, year 2 - The weekend drifts by.
Its been an indoors sort of a weekend, while Jack Frost and his snow ruled outdoors. The sort of weekend for huddling up warm and cosy inside. The sort of weekend to look out at the wind blowing the snow around into all sorts of crazy shapes and forms, or into gravity-defying places on the trees.
I can’t deny it looks beautiful, looking out from the warm indoors. I can’t deny it was great to go out and experience it. I definitely can’t deny that I was very glad to get indoors again and didn’t have to go out anywhere at all this weekend!
Day 37, year 2 - the snow and the ivy.
Sam Gamgee was none too impressed on encountering snow out in the wild on his adventures. Snow is all well and good, he thought, when you’re lying cosy in bed in the morning and its falling outside. He wanted the snow in Eregion to head off to The Shire, where folks might appreciate it……and today he got his wish.
It was most certainly the hobbit-sized folk who appreciated it most, as the tops of garden walls, scraped clean of their snowy burden, can attest. Garden walls are just the perfect height for making easy snowballs, don’t you think? They’ll have plenty of opportunity ahead to redistribute, with the snow set to remain all weekend. Doubtless Sam would approve.
Evergreen plants always seems so incongruous in the snow, I find. Almost embarrassed to be weighed down with it while their deciduous cousins quickly shrug the snow from their bare branches. They shouldn’t be embarrassed though, because the contrast of colours and tones is beautiful. Almost worth having the snow for. Almost….
If you’re somewhere in the shire and huddling inside away from the snow tonight then do keep warm and think extra carefully if you really need to go out anywhere in the ice and snow this weekend. Unless, of course, you’re heading into the garden to make a snow-hobbit or two!
Day 365 - Snow surprise
Well the snow certainly hadn’t appeared on any forecasts before it appeared outside my door, which left me rather surprised!
Only a light dusting, no more than half an inch, and yet it was plenty enough to transform everywhere it had touched. Remnants of garden plants, fences, trees, grasses and even derelict spider webs were all refocussed and seen anew through a white filter of unexpected beauty.
(This post was sat in my drafts last night and I was unable to publish, due to Tumblr’s downtime. Sad to miss the appropriate day, but posted all the same.)
Day 364 - Jack Frost claims his kingdom
A clear and starlit night, the sort that makes me think of Cuiviénen, saw Jack Frost creeping in around the edges, slowly starting his dance. Each place his dancing feet fell upon bore his touch and by the morning he had claimed his kingdom.
Jack Frost rules the day and seems set to maintain his invasion for a few days. All is crunchy white and penetrating cold.
Day 352 - Days of deep frost, getting closer
Today was the first real frost of the season, not a gentle dusting, melt when you touch it frost but a deep, crunchy frost that weakened sunlight cannot so easily dismiss.
There’ll be many such days ahead, days when the earth turns to iron and everything wears furry white gloves, but this first crunchy frost is no less beautiful, especially when seen up close and each tiny cube of frost turns into a tumble of white blocks.
Day 247 - the face in the sky
It’s not every day that you look up at the sky and see it looking back at you.
Can you see it?
Day 239 - the flowers that bind
Hedge Bindweed is not a plant that had a lot of creativity put into its name, it must be said. Hated by gardeners that seek perfection, I find it difficult to hate when it comes into flower and snakes to the top of the hedgerows.
Pure white and trumpeting summer, they shine in the sunlight and look beautiful to me, dotted around the overgrown hedges and corners of the fields around the woods….but then again, I don’t have to deal with trying to control them!
