White Christmas

Galanthus elwesii on Christmas Day

We had no snow for Christmas - like the preceding week, the weather was mild and damp - but we did find the first flowering clump of snowdrops of the winter (Galanthus elwesii) - so a white Christmas of a sort.

A White post-Christmas

Two days later, however, and here we are with another dump of the white stuff - about 4 inches overnight (not forecast).  I've been out again shovelling snow, and knocking it off the same lot of shrubs as last time.  The sun is out and it all looks very pretty, but it will freeze tonight so tomorrow is going to be rather icy.

There has been very little gardening in the meantime; too much to do festivity-wise, and the weather  has mostly not been encouraging.  I have managed to cut off some of the branches damaged by the first fall of snow, but not all; there were more than I had realised.  The other Viburnum tinus ('Gwenlian', further down the garden and out of sight behind other shrubs) also needed surgery (more still to be done there; it is seriously overgrown).  Other forays into the garden have mostly been to fetch vegetables (kale, and the last of the little carrots in the trough in the greenhouse, which we had for Christmas dinner), to cut evergreens for Christmas decorations and to feed birds.  Bird notables this week have been a pair of bullfinches, eating buds on the winter honeysuckle (Lonicera purpusii), which fortunately still has plenty of flowers on it, and a wonderful sighting of a red kite hunting low over the field opposite the house and even over the lane outside our front gate; it was riding a stiff wind, with wing- and tail-feathers tilting and angling as it fought to hold its position in the breeze.  Sadly the camera was out of reach at the time!