Scenes from a Winter Garden

The taste of a snowflake.

Have you ever closed your eyes and pointed out your tongue to taste a snow flake?

Torgeir, our oldest son, had volunteered to make dinner last night. A late dinner, unlike when we usually eat. But 8 o'clock was what suited all of us. When he started his work in the kitchen he realised that Marta and her friend had eaten the noddles he had planned to use in his wok. Starting late he was in a hurry to finish....Ingrid had an appointment as soon as we had eaten.

While Torgeir started to cut the vegetables I walked over to the grocery store for more nuddles.
It was snowing heavily. The perfect time to taste snowflakes

Now it is time......

It is time to visit the garden centers and to read the seed catalogues. What I especially love is to look at the colours and plan how I want to design the colours in my garden this year. I will saw the first seeds in two weeks. Some which will give red flowers. The first week of Lent is a red week in The House in the Woods.

Greeted by the moon

A pale winter moon greeted me when I came home from work today.

A pink sky floated over the playhouse.

Growing light, my vitamins these days.

The Beauty of Snow

Blue sky.

Growing daylight.

Snow.

The beauty of winter can be divine.

.....and indoors I read garden books and seed catalogues......

Guess what I found today! A Britt-Arnhild flower :-)

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Some days are vulnerable days.

I had one of those today,

but then an angel dusted some love on me

and sent me a flower through bloglandia.......

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A Britt -Arnhild Flower :)
A Blue Hyacinth flower to go with Britt Arnhilds Blue blogs.I have just been reading her many blogs about food, opera, and the garden. They are full of lovely warm storys. The house in the woods has 800 posts with lovely photos to illustrate the prose. Not bad for someone whos first language is Norwegion.http://brittarnhildshouseinthewoods.typepad.com/brittarnhilds_house_in_th/The Blue Cafe is here:http://thebluecafe.blogspot.com/And finally the Blue Garden with some dreamy winter pictures of snow and tree branches:http://brittarnhildsbluegarden.blogspot.com/Someone who blogs almost as much as me. Hope you all check her lovely blogs out :)

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This is cut and pasted from David's blog

Snappy's Garden blog

(with his permission)

Some blue in the white......and other colours waiting.

My Yew.

We have a yew tree between the blue garden and the road outside.

Late last autumn we discovered alot of small red berries on it.

Yew, or "barlind" as it is called in Norway, was a new tree to me when we moved in here 6 years ago. Over the years I have come to love it; the green it gives us all year, the privacy it gives from life outside the garden, the way it gives shelter to birds and squirrels, the shade it gives when I sit at the Blue Table writing my reflections.

There is a Yew-tree, pride of Lorton Vale,

Which to this day stands single, in the midst

Of its own darkness, as it stood of yore;

Not loth to furnish weapons for the bands

Of Umfraville or Percy ere they marched

To Scotland's heaths; or those that crossed the sea

And drew their sounding bows at Azincour,

Perhaps at earlier Crecy, Poictiers.

Of vast circumference and gloom profound

This solitary tree! a living thing

Produced too slowly ever to decay;

Of form and aspect too magnificent

To be destroyed"

William Wordsworth

Inspired by the magnificent Yew at Lorton, Cumbria.

The girth of this tree was measured as 27 ft in 1806.

Today half the trunk remains (19 ft circumference).

More information about yew here.

.....so instead I make a garden indoors.

You are so right Barbara. The only thing a gardener can do at this time of the year is to wait :-)

The waiting will be long up here though, so I fill the indoor of my house with flowering plants.

No use waiting for spring yet.........

Living in Norway means that there is winter many months of the year. It is not like in Narnia though as it was the first time Lucy and her siblings came there, with winter all year, and no Christmas. Can you imagine! You all know that in our house we celebrate Christmas the big way. But now Christmas is only a fading memory, the days are getting longer and my mind is turing against spring. Though spring is still a long time away... I couldn't resist photographing a few of my empty flowerpots. They are on the veranda right outside the kitchen. When summer comes they will all be filled with bright and colourful herbs.
I plan a rainbow garden this year. Will plant seeds which will give flowers in all colours during the period of lent, and it will be a reminder of the rainbow God set in the sky. The rainbow which is God's sign of hope.

Books for Christmas.

Books are the best gifts I can get for Christmas. This Christmas I got quite alot and have hours of great and interesting reading ahead of me. During the past summers I've spent more and more time out in the garden, and this growing interest takes me to garden books and magazines during the cold months. Therefore it was a wonderful surprise to get a garden book from a good friend spending a year overseas. Digging Deep, Unearthing your Creative Roots through Gardening by Fran Sorin.The garden is dead and frosen these days. Even my garden blog is almost sleeping. But reading about Sorin's six stages of creative unfolding - imagining, planning, planting, tending, enjoying and completing..........I am counting the weeks now till I can start gardening again.

A low sun.

The cold wintersun is so low these weeks it only reaches the top of the trees in the back garden.
I keep on dreaming of a spring and a summer which bring life to the garden.