A cold garden

The hottest year and then the coldest night

Monday 19th January 2015

It hasn’t been a very newsworthy week.  We went for one short walk . . . my only gardening activity involved short spells of cutting back the holly hedge . . . and I wasted a lot of time messing around on the computer, trying to get attachments with various file extensions to open . . . and then decided to experiment with composing the blog on Google Docs instead of WordPad or Outlook.com.  But we have had a lot of weather - more than enough!

We have had buckets of rain, days of gales which caused ferry cancellations, a sprinkling of snow on the hills and last night was the coldest night of the year - which isn’t saying much because the year is only a few day old.  There was visible evidence of the low temperature.  When I went out to put a packet of rubbish in the bin down by the gate, I noticed that a couple of buckets which had filled with rainwater were covered with ice.  I took a photo and then prodded the ice expecting it to be a thin film floating on the top.  It was rock hard and must be quite a thick layer.  By the way, the piece of stone in the bottom of the black bucket was put there to stop it blowing away in the gales.  

There was frost on the grass this morning but there hadn’t been enough dew for a really white frost - it was more a paler shade of green.   The words “a greener shade of pale” keep coming into my mind.  I vaguely recall a Noel Coward quote about the potency of music.  Thanks to Google, I have found the quote “Strange how potent cheap music is.”  Not entirely apt perhaps - at least not in a financial terms.  I expect Procol Harum made a lot of money out of A whiter shade of pale.  By the way I am not showing off my knowledge of 1960's British rock music - Google helped with that info as well.  

I was curious about the origin of the name of the band and looked it up.  Like most things on the internet this may or may not be true - but I liked it so I will choose to believe the story.  Apparently the band were looking for a name and their manager suggested Procol Harum which he had been told was the pedigree name of a friend's cat.  The band members liked the sound of the words and said "Oh, great" or words to that effect.  But the manager had misheard the name during a phone call.  The cat was actually called Procul Harun which means "beyond these things" in Latin - and this explains the discrepancy between the band's name and the translation.

I have been looking at clouds again.  I have never learned the names of various types of clouds.  There doesn’t seem to be much point unless one wants to work in the met office.  Anyway I think that words sometimes just get in the way of our enjoyment of visual beauty.  To quote another popular song “It’s clouds’ illusions I recall . . . I really don’t know clouds at all.”  

Most of my cloud watching is done around sunrise which was 08-26 today.  Here is a collage of some recent clouds and a condensation trail on the 11th which looked almost like pink lightning.

Our only walk was on Friday.  We trudged up the muddy path through Skyhill plantation to look at the snow on the hills.  It wasn’t as spectacular as we expected after hearing that the mountain road had been closed after a heavy snowfall.

Progress on the holly hedge has been slow.  Some days have been too windy to venture up the ladder but I have finally reached my goal - the hawthorn tree.  I wanted to get this part of the hedge finished early so that I wouldn’t disturb the great tits if they decide to use the nest box this year.

The hedge - 17/12/2014

The hedge - a month later.

The other half of the hedge, between the hawthorn and the top of the garden, can wait until summer.  There are a lot of daffodils in the bed next to the hedge and I don’t want to crush the leaves.  It will be best to wait until they have died back.

I have a talent for finding excuses to procrastinate.  I am ashamed to admit that I put off loading the supper dishes in the dishwasher until the next morning because I claim that I sleep better if I am not too active in the evening.  In winter this tactic has the added benefit of working in the kitchen when it is getting light - so that I can enjoy watching the birds visiting the feeder.

The long tailed tits have been visiting more than once a day.  I miss seeing them in the summer months so their winter visits are even more of a treat.  They are very agile and often feed upside down.  

I forgot to mention last week that 2014 has been confirmed as the warmest year on record in the British Isles.  “Provisional figures for the whole year reveal that it was the hottest for the UK in records dating back to 1910.

Last year was also the warmest in the Central England Temperature series, the longest running temperature record in the world which stretches back to 1659, recording temperatures in an area of central England.

The average temperature for the year was 9.9C, some 1.1C above the long term average, and making it warmer than the previous record year of 2006.

It was also the fourth wettest year in records dating back to 1910, the Met Office said.

The figures for 2014 mean that eight of the UK’s top 10 warmest years have occurred since 2002, the weather and climate experts said.”

None of this is good news when you take into account an article in the Independent on January 11 which explains the danger of rising temperatures to our trees which are being attacked by more and more pests and diseases.  An interesting fact in the article is that “More than 360 species, an "unprecedented" number, from daisies and dandelions to geraniums and cyclamen, are in flower. It is the latest evidence of the UK's changing climate, they say.

However, the numbers of plants do not simply indicate an early spring, according to experts, as only 5 per cent of the species recorded are spring-flowering native specialists.

Ecologist Dr Tim Rich, of the British and Irish Botanical Society said: "It's a good indication the climate is warming. Twenty years ago, you'd have been lucky to get 20 species in flower in mid-winter. To have 368 is phenomenal."

I imagine that the number of flowering plants is higher in the south of the UK than it is on the Island but I had a prowl around the garden and found an odd tatty flower - primroses, violets, feverfew, Welsh poppies, even an oxeye daisy and a campanula.  These were the best of the primroses but they look as though they regret exposing themselves to the recent sleet.

Some of the other flowers don’t mind the cold and are faring better.  This little garden relative of the primroses has sent up an early flower spike in the rose bed.

Then I found a lovely “greener shade of pale” hellebore below the retaining wall at the bottom of the garden.

The hellebore flowers have an interesting marking - only visible from near ground level.

In the bed above the wall some heather was flowering.

And all over the garden there are patches of snowdrops.  These are in the front garden near the old stump, which has been left as a memorial to our lovely birch that blew down many moons ago.  The little clumps bright green leaves are early bluebell shoots - probably Spanish bluebells which were planted in the garden before we moved here although some have hybridised with the native English bluebells.

But my favourite patch of snowdrops are these which I can enjoy from the kitchen window although the daffodils in front are shooting up so fast that they will soon obscure the snowdrops.  This morning they are enjoying a brief patch of sunlight.