December 2008

We're well into December now, the 8th, and you have to look harder and harder to see things still in bloom. The hardy fuchsias are still going remarkably strong, these here are from what we got as a very small cutting from Chris and Sue this spring. It has grown nicely and has been a steady bloomer.

There may no longer be a lot to see in terms of fresh blooms, there is no shortage though of signs of things to come, in this case the earliest Hellebore

It's December 13th and in a few of the hanging baskets we can still see plenty of Bacopa in bloom. In addition to the usual white ones, we also have some pale blue and pale pink ones. But they won't last much longer unfortunately.

As you can see, we have Galanthus galore. It'll be a few weeks yet before these Snowdrops will bloom of course, but it's always nice to see them poke their heads through the soil as the early ambassadors of spring to come.

The next day however it was all covered under a blanket of snow, the first of the season. I figure we had about 10cm of the white stuff.

The snow sure has been sticking around this year, much to the delight of the canines. This is Neka, both her and Ace take great delight in pushing the snow around with their noses when it's still fluffy. Once it's been trampled and it's started to freeze over there's no bigger fun than to go outside and chew a few nice, crunchy chunks of ice.

This shot BTW, was taken with my new Panasonic DMC-G1 and its 45-200mm zoom, my old, not-so-trusty Olympus would never have allowed this tight a close-up shot full frame.

It's now December 21st and it's snowing again. Hard. But not so hard we couldn't venture forth outside and record some of the beauty around us. Yes, it made travel a big mess -I didn't go into work the next day- and not just on the road, air travel was essentially non-existent, with tons of people being at the airport for 2, 3 days or more.

Around 9.45 AM on December 24th, before we had more snow. While I did not measure the depth of the snow -didn't want to disturb it- I figure there's around 17-18 inches on the gate.