Many parts of the country have suffered through a long, cold, very snowy winter. Unfortunately we count ourselves among that group. Though the temps have risen significantly and we've seen a fair amount of sunshine, the snow is lingering to say the least. You can get a sense of what I mean in this group of photos that comprise a brief tour of our front and back gardens. I wish it were an April Fool's joke but we're not laughing!
Looking west from the driveway:
Looking towards the house from the street:
A tighter shot of the same view shows how dirty, hard and crusty the snow is at the end of the season. Nothing pretty about it. The brown leaves you see on the left are Acers that hold their leaves all winter.
Looking from the east edge of our lot line where you can see our neighbor's bags of chopped leaves in his annual Maginot Line of demarcation:
We've come around the east side of the house and are now looking up the dry stream and across the pond (in the center) to the tea house:
Snow or no, we did grill out on Easter yesterday. Looking west across the deck:
If you enlarge this photo, you can see the clump of bamboo is righting itself after being buried under snow since Dec. 19. Pretty amazing recovery. This view is looking southwest from the front edge of the deck:
The next three images were all taken in the southwest corner of the garden where the big Austrian pine came down in December and took out two other trees. You can see sawdust, logs, the big stump and broken tree trunks:
The stump in the background (above) is a crabapple that we took out a number of years ago. The one sign of Spring that has me excited is the arrival of the first snowdrops. These are all doubles growing next to the cement foundation of the house on the south side. I picked my first bouquet to put on the kitchen windowsill for Easter.