Harbingers of spring

TPP had the opportunity to have a walk around the gardens.  Signs of spring are everywhere.  The witch-hazel are flowering, as are the snowdrops.  Winter aconite is lifting its flowers and showing the bright yellow perianth, although it appears to be growing in a new location, so it seeded in or some new corms were planted and TPP doesn't remember.  Now let's check the date: Feb. 25th.  Yes, that's early, but witch-hazel has flowered earlier by a week or so on several occasions; this would set a new record for the winter aconite which has never flowered before March 5 before.  This is only about 3 days earlier for snowdrops.  No idea which of these harbingers is most reliable.  The buds are swelling on the silver maple trees, and the filbert pollen catkins have elongated.  Got a bit of snowy rain but nothing to really discourage these real early flowers.  Picked a couple of forsythia branches to see it we can force some early flowers.

At long last spring?

Yesterday was the vernal equinox, a bit of a misnomer because if TPP understands it correctly, the night and day light hours are not exactly equal because of something or other about when the day is declared started and finished.  But this doesn't matter because spring is declared when our plants start to flower. Today the snowdrops, one small cluster, were declared in flower, our first flowers of the 2014 season, so it's spring. Today was the first day the Phactors took a tour of the estate, and the damage was pretty grim, a combination of bad bun-buns and severe cold. Both took a toll. Spring clean up will be quite a chore.

Crazy weather

Here in the upper midwest, if you don't like the weather just wait a day and it'll change.  Fortunately the predicted ice storm failed to fully freeze leaving the predictors' record of failure for major weather events intact.  Yesterday the high temperature was 64F and new record for January 29th by 3 degrees.  Thunderstorms swept through the region giving us about an inch of badly needed precipitation.  This mid-winter thaw came immediately after the coldest week of the winter.  This morning the temperature was still in the 50s but the low tonight is predicted to be about 28F, and the low tomorrow around 2 F, a change of 62 degrees in a bit over 48 hours.  As for my snowdrops in flower, this is not good news because as tough as they are single digit freezing temperatures may be too much for them.  Lots of bulbs are pushing up, and if covered with a layer of snow they would be fine, but sticking up bereft of any insulation some leaf tips will get damaged.  The lily pond is now quite full and while almost completely frozen over previously, most of the ice has melted.  Whoosh.  The sound of battling fronts, warm, moist ones from the southwest and brutally cold dry ones from the northwest, some of that imported Great White North weather.  So what's our border policy on letting in this foreign weather?