cold weather gardening

There's not much to do when the weather is like this. But I still have a brown bin to fill so I cut my vine. Since the stroke I'm banned from ladders as the drugs I'm on = low blood pressure = risk of fainting, but fortunately I had a pole lopper lurking in the shed, so snip snip, down it came. 

Last year's brutal combination of snaps (cold, wet, dry, etc.) had left me unripe grapes rotting on the branches, so I'd ignored them in the hope that they'd at least be decent fodder for some overwintering animal or bird. Nothing wild had so much as touched them (bar the moulds - they had had fun) so into the brown bin they went with the rest of the branches. 

I filled my brown bin, which was enough to lose all my body heat. I feel the cold a lot more now than I used to before the stroke. I trimmed off the top of the tallest rose. But I baulked at clearing away the rough overgrowth of perennial weeds (bindweed, willowherb, long purples, etc.) from the big bed. Under the brown were hellebores coming through the angle, and the dead and desiccated overgrowth of weeds was giving them a modicum of protection from the bleak midwinter.

I'm glad I left it. This week was the hard frost week, the proper winter week, the week where I knock out a perfect disc of rock-solid ice every morning from the bird bath and through the week they accumulate, mysterious disks on my sere winter front bed. But still the hellebores persist, in muted colours, heads dropped modestly and safely down, so that frost and snow won't foul their delicate parts. 

Hellebore breeding has been quite wild in recent years, but though I have few of the fluttering, ruffled types (I bought a nursery six-pack from an impulse display one year, and they are establishing, slowly, alongside the older varieties shown here) I favour the classic plant, an open face, a flower almost dropped back to the greys, browns and muted greens of winter, that soft February palette that is waiting for the bright brushstrokes of spring proper.

The whisper, where others shout. But they still say: spring is coming.