Winter in Decker Prairie

No, this isn't my garden today. The picture was actually taken at Rocky Mountain National Park when we were there a couple of years ago, but it sort of feels like this today in my garden.

We have had frozen precipitation this morning. Sleet, snow, freezing rain - you name it - although it hasn't actually been cold enough for it to stick except on high places like roofs. There has been a cold wind blowing much of the time which made it unpleasant to be outside for very long.

I've been keeping an eye on my bird feeders, all of which are overrun with hungry birds, mostly American Goldfinches. I have to refill some of the feeders every day or two now to keep the birds happy.

And that is Decker Prairie here at mid-winter. Tonight the temperatures are predicted to be heading down to the 20s degrees Fahrenheit. By Friday, it should be back near the mid-70s again. Pity the poor plants that have to keep adjusting to these changes.

But spring is coming to be followed by the near intolerable heat of summer, and probably sooner than we think. Then we will remember with nostalgia these cold days of late January and February.

Winter is coming

33 degrees F. on November 12??? Really? Well, that's what the Weather Channel website shows as our predicted low for tonight. It seems as though winter may be arriving a bit early this year.

Our high today, which occurred at mid-morning, was 64 and already the temperature has fallen to 58, so 33 does seem eminently reachable tonight, especially if the clouds clear out as expected and the skies are clear.

All of which raises a delicate question for a gardener: Should I protect any of my plants? After all, 33 degrees is just one tiny degree away from freezing.

Most of my plants that are in the ground are very tough and I'll take my chances with them, but I do have some plants outside in pots that could be damaged by the low temperatures. Should I lug them inside or cover them with frost cloth?

One plant in particular comes to mind. My Christmas cactus has flourished in a pot under the magnolia tree all summer and it is now full of buds. I would be devastated to lose it, so that one will definitely be coming inside to rest in a closet for a few weeks.

Then there's the big Ficus benjamina tree that lives in a pot on the patio. It has sentimental value for me because it was a gift from friends on the death of my father fifteen years ago. I have babied that tree through various traumas over the years, including a previous unexpected freeze. It made it through that time, but it doesn't like cold weather. Time to bring it inside, I think, or at least to a protected corner of the back porch.

So, time to get outside and start shifting some plants before the temperature drops any further. Our average first frost date is still about three weeks away, but there are always unexpected exceptions. Tonight just may be one of them.

This week in the garden - #48

Is winter over? Has spring arrived early this year? It certainly seemed like it this week as daytime temperatures headed toward 80 degrees.

Looking around the yard, it was clear that something was going on. The bluebirds and the wrens were busy checking out possible nesting sites. As I went about my garden tasks, I kept encountering green anoles who were out sunning themselves. Last night, when I turned on the back porch light, I looked up to see a couple of Mediterranean  geckos perched on the ceiling waiting for some unwary insect to come close enough to grab. Also, that harbinger of spring for our more northern friends, the American Robin, showed up in the yard this week.

Some years I have robins in my yard all winter long, occasionally in very large numbers, but I hadn't actually seen or heard any in the yard this winter until this week. The last ones I had seen here were in late summer/early autumn. Now, suddenly, they seem to be everywhere.

And then there are the butterflies. I stopped seeing Monarchs and Queens several weeks ago, but this week they've joined my winter butterflies, the Sulphurs, the Painted Ladies, the American Snouts, and the Red Admirals, in a virtual parade of butterfly beauty.

Of course, if it is January, it's time for the Carolina jessamine to start blooming.

 And there it is - right on cue. In another week or ten days, this vine will be full of these yellow blossoms.

The cold weather that we had last week encouraged the purple oxalis to bring out its pretty little pink blooms.

This oxalis generally continues to bloom for me well into spring when the hot weather causes it to take a rest.

Cleanup of the winter garden continued this week at a slow pace. I developed a respiratory infection with fever. Cold? Flu? Who knows - it just makes one feel rotten. So I had to take it easy, but I did manage to get a few things done. My best work of the week was adding some pansies and violas for a little winter color. 

Few things can perk up the spirits like the happy little faces of violas and pansies.

First frost - sort of

The average first frost date for my area is December 10, and last night, right on schedule, we did have our first frost. It didn't actually amount to much. It wasn't what we used to call on the farm a "killing frost," but it did put an end to the tenderest of the tender.

The banana plants, for example, were well nipped.

And the old cannas by the fence are as brown as that fence today.

There'll be no more brugmansia blooms this year.

The tops of the Hamelia patens received the brunt of the frost. Underneath the plants are still green, but there'll be no more blooms from them this year either.

The most exposed parts of the Turk's caps along the southern wall of the house got nipped back, but the overall plant is well-protected and still providing blooms for my overwintering hummingbirds.

One of those hummingbirds, a female Rufous, was getting as close as she could to the sun today on this exposed branch.

The Copper Canyon daisy, which is actually rather a tender plant, did not appear to be damaged and is still blooming.

And this crinum which was just about to burst into bloom is still just about to burst into bloom

It looks like the temperature may get down to 32 degrees again tonight which will probably mean a bit more frost. Just two weeks until Christmas, so it's about time we had some cold weather!

The woolly bear prediction

Consider the humble woolly bear caterpillar. It is the larva of the Isabella moth, a rather nondescript moth which is common from northern Mexico right up to the southern half of Canada. Though the moth may go unnoticed, the caterpillars are pretty visible and they are one of the few caterpillars that most people can actually identify. Moreover, folklore imbues them with psychic abilities. They are said to be able to predict what kind of winter we will have. Will winter be mild or harsh? Look to the woolly bear, the believers say.

The typical woolly bear is black on both ends and has a strip of lighter brown in the middle. In fact, one of the common names of the caterpillar is "black-ended bear." The folk legend surrounding the caterpillar's meteorological prognostications says that the wider that lighter brown band is, the milder the winter the winter will be. A narrow band of brown predicts a harsh winter.

How then to interpret this visitor that I found on my front doorstep this morning?

No brown band at all!

Winter is coming, as all George R.R. Martin fans know. And if this little woolly bear is truly an omen of that winter, it may be a doozy!

The garden week

It's been a great week in the garden, starting with 3.3 inches of rain on Monday. Since then, we've had mostly beautiful days, although the last two have been quite cold.

I've marked several chores off my to-do list this week. I made major inroads on the weeding, got most of the frost-bitten plants cut back, moved several of the perennials to new beds, and started some seeds under lights. All in all, a productive week.

What I need most right now are a few more weeks just like this one, including the rain. Then, my garden would be in good shape and ready for spring.

Spring is just around the corner, you know. And then comes summer. In Southeast Texas, summer is never far away.

Wordless Wednesday: Bright leaves, bright winter sky

A gardener's week - #22

This gardener's week has been spent mostly inside. My only forays into the garden have been to feed the fish in the pond and net out the leaves and debris, to refill the birdfeeders, and to assess damage from the couple of nights of below freezing weather that we had.

The fish appear to be handling winter. I actually put a heater into the water to give them one area with a little bit of extra warmth, and I often find them swimming in that part of the pond.

The birds are thriving and emptying my birdfeeders on a regular basis.

The garden itself seems to be holding up. I could not detect much additional freeze damage this week. Many of the perennials are sending up green leaves from their roots already. I counted seven bluebonnets in the wildflower bed, and, well, you already know about the poppies. Spring indeed is coming. It might not be evident on these cold, gray days, but stop and look just a little closer and you will see it. All it will take is a few days of sunshine and daytime temperatures in the 60s and it will begin to break the iron grip of winter.

Most of my "gardening" this week has been of the daydreaming variety, and instead of digging in the dirt, I've spent most of my days digging into books.

I finished reading Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas. This is a warmly humorous and loving series of essays detailing the author's family's experiences upon coming to America just before the Iranian Revolution and the taking of the American hostages in Tehran. It is a reminder to us of just how lucky our country has been to attract the best the world has to offer in immigrants.

I also read A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick. This is a wonderful book to read when it is cold because it takes place in the cold, cold winters of Wisconsin in 1907 and 1908. It's a terrific book - a kind of gothic bodice-ripper/psychological thriller. It might remind you, as it did me, of Daphne du Maurier and the Bronte' sisters.

And now, to finish out the week, I'm reading Persuasion by Jane Austen. I started reading all of Austen's major works last year and this is the last one. I think it may be one of my favorites, though I doubt it will top Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice.

And speaking of Pride and Prejudice reminds me that I also saw a wonderful movie this week - The King's Speech starring Colin Firth. I freely admit that I have been madly in love with Colin Firth since I first saw him play Mr. Darcy in the A&E series production of P&P many years ago. I also freely admit that I own the DVDs and that, periodically, my daughter and I sit down and watch them and swoon all over again. I was delighted to see that the actress who played Elizabeth Bennett to Firth's Darcy in that series was also in The King's Speech - Jennifer Ehle. She played Geoffrey Rush's wife. If you haven't seen this movie yet, do it!

And other than that, well, I've been sitting around watching my indoor garden grow this week. Here it is:



I'm always reluctant to use live plants in my aquarium because I've had bad experiences with snails brought in on the plants, but PetSmart guaranteed these were snail-free and so I decided to try them. They've been in the aquarium several weeks now and no snails have shown up and, so far, the fish haven't eaten them.

That's my week. Will next week bring more spring-like weather and will I actually get to play in my garden? Tune in next Friday and see.

Shhh! Can you keep a secret?

Now that the season is fading fast, I have a guilty secret to share with you. I can trust you, right? I mean, we are friends and you would never use knowledge of my loathsome secret against me, would you? Okay, come a little closer and I will whisper it in your ear.

I LOVED THIS WINTER!!!

I hear your gasps and I feel your pain at my betrayal, but I have to come clean. Confession is good for the soul, and my soul needs all the help it can get.

Yes, it's true, for years now I have groused to everyone who would listen about the fact that we hadn't had a REAL winter in ten or fifteen years. A stray night or two under 32 degrees and that was it - nothing that anyone in Buffalo or Chicago would recognize as actual winter. To be honest, those folks probably still wouldn't recognize what we had this season as winter, but the people in Memphis and Nashville would and that's closer to home for me.

You see, I grew up in a place where there were four distinct seasons in the year. We had a real spring, summer, autumn, and winter and you could tell when one ended and the next one began. And that's the way my internal calendar was set from childhood. That's what I expected the seasons to be like. These last several years, I've been totally confused and cranky, because winter was completely left off our seasonal calendar. In reality, we had only two seasons: Seven months of Summer from April through October and five months of Not Summer from November through March.

It was downright depressing. Insect and weed pests flourished and the gardener and her plants flagged by about June 15. It was all downhill from there. And then, like a cool breeze on a hot August day, came the El Nino winter of 2009-2010 with its extended periods of below-freezing weather and occasional spurts of white, fluffy stuff falling from the sky. It was very refreshing.

Well, okay, I know it caused hardship and some heartache for some gardeners in the area and I am sorry about that. I lost a few plants, too, and I'm still waiting to see about some others, some of which I would be particularly sorry to lose. But you want to know the truth? Those plants that I lost probably shouldn't have been planted here in the first place. I pushed the envelope and the envelope pushed right back. A valuable lesson has been (re)learned.

It's not that I will be sorry to see winter go at 12:32 P.M. tomorrow, but I just wanted to say a kind word about the old season before it leaves. After all, we've griped and complained about it since that first freeze caught us by surprise early last December, but I, for one, wish to go on the record by stating that this is exactly the winter I had been wishing for these past several wimpy winter years and I want to thank Mother Nature for finally granting that wish. I feel sure that I will be a better and wiser gardener and that my garden will be a better balanced and more natural environment because of it.

The halcyon days of late winter

(Originally posted here on February 2, 2009.)

As I walked into my yard early this morning, I saw a giant moving shadow. No, it wasn't a groundhog. It was the shadow of a flock of hundreds of blackbirds that rose up from my lawn and flew off down the street.

Never mind that I don't have a groundhog - the blackbirds are a more reliable predictor of mid-winter and the coming of spring. When they start gathering in huge flocks and descending on our yards to scrounge birdseed or whatever else they can find to eat, we know that winter has reached its peak and it is all downhill toward spring from here.

And now, as we head into this downhill sprint over the next six weeks, we gardeners will be in a race with the sun, as it heads back north along the horizon after a winter in the southern skies. As our planet's wobbling orbit slowly begins to tilt the northern hemisphere toward the sun, our days get longer and warmer and one morning we will wake up and open our front door to a blast of hot air. Then we'll know that summer is here - probably around April Fool's Day!

But from Groundhog Day until April Fool's Day, we gardeners of Southeast Texas have a window of opportunity. These are the halcyon days of pleasant and calm weather when we hurry to try to get our major projects of the year completed before we are immobilized by the summer heat.

It is the busiest and, in many ways, the best time of the year to be in the garden. The days are mostly of tolerable temperatures and humidity except when a chill wind blows, or we are wrapped in a foggy mist for much of the day. It is a time when it is possible to work hard in the garden for most of the day without being uncomfortably drenched in sweat and perhaps having to change your tee shirt a couple of times during the day. It is a time to just enjoy being outside and playing in the dirt.

Working outside today, I could hear the sounds of spring coming all around me. Cardinals, mockingbirds, wrens, chickadees, and robins were all practicing their spring songs. And the woodpeckers were practicing their drumming.

Once, as I was transplanting some foxtail asparagus fern to a bed under the red oak tree, I heard a very faint sound of a woodpecker drumming. It sounded as if it were coming from a great distance and yet the sound seemed to be emanating from somewhere on my tree.

I squinted up through the bare branches and finally located the source - a tiny Downy Woodpecker drumming very gently, almost as if he were humming to himself, practicing his chops before the big show. Very soon, he'll be onstage for real and will be drumming hard to attract a lady woodpecker and to proclaim his territory, but today he just seemed to be playing, enjoying himself in the sun.

It made me smile to see him there, and especially, it made me glad that I was there to see him. On days like this, it is good to be a gardener.

Frustrating Friday

At the beginning of this week, I had big plans about all that I would accomplish in the garden in the next seven days. Well, the sixth day is history and most of my big plans are unfulfilled. What with one thing and another, events and the weather intervened to screw things up for me. Sometimes it seems that that is the story of my life. Frustration, thou art the gardener's middle name.

Most of what I had hoped to accomplish involved putting in some new beds on the south side of the house and working on getting stones laid in the sitting area under my red oak tree. It wasn't a total washout because I did get the turf removed from the area where I'm installing the new bed along the side of the house, and DH (Dauntless Hubby) did spend one day working on the sitting area, removing some roots that were in the way, but the rest will just have to wait for us. The weather is looking a bit more promising for tomorrow, so maybe I can recoup part of my plans then.

Meantime, the weather is what woke me Friday morning at 4:00. A loud clap of thunder that sounded like it exploded right outside my window was followed by rain pounding the roof. I listened for quite some time before I managed to drift off to dreamland again. When I got up later and checked my rain gauge, I found that we had gotten two-and-a-half inches of rain during the night. Even though the rain let up after daybreak, it was too wet and muddy to do much work outside. A bit chilly, too.

Fortunately, the weather forecast for this weekend seems to have ameliorated a bit. That big freeze that was being forecast early in the week has gone away. The predictors now say it should get down to 32 here tonight, which means that it will probably be a bit colder than that in my backyard. Still, that's much better than the 20s that were predicted earlier.

In the time that I did get to spend in the garden this week, I was dismayed to see that more damage from the January freeze continues to rear its ugly head. Some oleanders that I thought would be okay now look like burnt toast, although they may still come back from the roots. My bougainvilleas and split-leaf philodrendons sustained more damage than I had thought, although they, too, may still come back given time. On the other hand, while examining the bed where my agapanthus lives, I was heartened to see the green tips of new growth pushing up through the mushy damaged leaves.

In other chores around the garden this week, I did manage to get some mulching of beds completed, a little more pruning of woody shrubs, and a bit more clean-up here and there, but, all in all, I have to admit I'm feeling a bit frustrated and cranky about my week so far. All I can say is, that sun better come out tomorrow!

Trees at mid-winter

"I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree," the poet Joyce Kilmer wrote just before he went off to serve in World War I, where his life ended. His poem lives on, and no one has ever better described the mystical hold of trees on the human psyche.

At all seasons of the year, trees have a kind of beauty and poetry and majesty of their own. In mid-winter, as at every season, they are the anchors of the garden.


Live oaks, of course, are much the same at all seasons. They never get fully undressed, although they do shed their old leaves in spring as new leaves are being produced. In winter, their leaves offer shelter and santuary for birds who need a safe haven from predators or from the weather.


The same can be said of the magnolia trees, a favorite roosting place for many birds in winter.

















The bottle tree never loses its "leaves" either - but I haven't noticed any birds roosting there.


The sycamore hangs on to a few of its leaves until they are finally displaced by new leaves in the spring. Every passing breeze brings a shower of sycamore seeds cascading down from the plentiful seed balls. These seeds are favorite winter food of many birds including the goldfinches who spend hours each day picking them out.


The apple tree, too, keeps back a few of its old leaves even as it prepares to open its swelling buds to the bees in late winter.


The corkscrew willow gives it all up, every leaf, and stands naked against the winter sky and the background of the neighbor's pine trees that tower over everything. The twisted limbs and twigs of the willow give some extra interest to the winter garden. Last summer, I learned that its leaves are hosts to some species of butterflies and moths. I knew there was a reason why I liked it.


The old crape myrtle was planted many years ago by birds, and it still feeds birds in winter with its seeds.










The upright limbs of the Shumard red oak seem to be lifted to the sky in praise and exultation.

None of these trees is old, as trees go. Except for the magnolia and the crape myrtle, we planted them all, but all of them, except for the willow, are now more than twenty years old. They have stood in our yard through drought and flood, heat and cold, and hurricane winds and they have been undaunted. Their leaves have shaken with our laughter, and in times of sadness, they have given me strength and consolation. They've always been there for me to lean on. They are friends to me.

I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as my trees.