My Garden Without Snow In December. A Merry Christmas!

December has arrived, a cold and dark month. I try to go for walks on sunny days, even though the sun rarely shines.

When I arrive at my summer cottage,I immediately turn on the electric heaters. It's difficult to warm up the house quickly because the temperature inside is the same as outside (+3°C to +1°C), but after a while, it becomes warm and cozy. 

Then I go into the garden, and after leaving the warm cottage, it's nice to stroll around, take photos, and then have a cup or two of hot tea with sandwiches and something sweet.

 

Rhododendrons thrive in this cool and damp weather. They tolerate light snow and rain well. Flower buds for the coming spring are clearly visible on the branches.
 

My thuja and silver fir are also happy that there is no frost or snow, because heavy snow can break their branches.

Here I show the plants in the garden last year, when there was a lot of snow.

Sometimes I come into the garden and there's very little snow. If the temperature rises during the day, the snow will have melted by evening.  This year, the sky is often gray and unwelcoming. 

Christmas and New Year are coming soon. I want to congratulate you all and wish you the very best, most importantly, health. If you celebrate national holidays in December, then I congratulate you too!

Wishes for a Merry Christmas! 

Faith, Hope, Love!

 Vera, Nadezda, Lubov! 

Winter Forest

 

 

 

 

 I made this short video to show you how beautiful the forest is in winter.  

I hope you enjoy it.

Take care! 

Rock Garden

Today I want to tell you about my visit to a rock garden, or alpine slide. I arrived at the Botanical Garden on a rainy day and had already given up hope of taking beautiful photos. But within half an hour, I was no longer paying attention to the drizzle, as the alpine plants amazed me with their arrangement among the stones, boulders, and rock formations.

 

The alpine garden features all kinds of natural stones: sea or river pebbles, sandstone, limestone, crushed stone, and gravel. It's worth noting that stone is the foundation of all structures: alpine slides, rockeries, dry streams, bridges, retaining structures, and garden paths.

I liked the look of the old boulders. The gravel mixture near the plantings imitates a dry stream. The alpine slide lacks any symmetry; all the garden paths, paved with stones or tiles, twist and turn. 

 

I noted that most of the garden plants are perennials: this gives the rock garden the most natural look and saves time and effort on maintenance.

 

 

Ducks kept the rock garden in order, glaring at me to make sure I didn't disturb it.

 

The designers and gardeners at the Botanical Garden used low-growing, slow-growing conifers, combining plants with different colors and crown shapes. Furthermore, conifers can create the perfect natural environment, far removed from human intervention.

This beautiful alpine rock garden was an unexpected discovery for me.

 

 

 

November

 November. According to the calendar, it's the last month of autumn. But the weather always makes its own adjustments to the calendar. This year, which is almost certainly drawing to a close, spring arrived very late. The cold weather lingered until May. The vegetable seedlings remained on my windowsill until the end of May. 

  

Now autumn is in no hurry to leave, as if eager to give us a little warmth we missed in the spring. It's trying to preserve its colors to delight northerners. Only frequent rains prevent us from walking in the fresh air and enjoying the autumn.

 

 

The trees and shrubs didn't shed their leaves in October. Only with the onset of cold, sometimes frosty, nights in November did the leaves begin to turn yellow and fall. Although the warm season is drawing to an end, we can still hear the crunch of yellow and golden leaves underfoot and admire the rays of sunlight filtering through the tree branches. 

 

 

What is November like in your region? Are you enjoying the colors of autumn, or is autumn just beginning? Or perhaps spring has just arrived and everything is blooming?   

Spider Lily

 I have several spider lily bulbs that I germinate indoors and then plant outdoors. If the lilies bloom late in the summer or fall, they can be transplanted into containers and grown indoors.

 

Hymenocallis, or spider lily, is a genus of plants in the Amaryllidaceae family. This unique and elegant plant is sometimes called "sea daffodil" or "Peruvian daffodil."
Hymenocallis requires warmth to thrive outdoors. Spider lilies, available in white and red, are the most popular and widely grown plant worldwide.

A minimum temperature of 13 degrees Celsius is required for growth. Water moderately until the leaves appear green, then stop when the leaves begin to wilt in the fall. For the winter, the plant is dug up from the open ground and stored. Hymenocallis undergoes a dormant period during the winter.
This large, showy flower, rare in cultivation, is coveted by exotic plant collectors.
Hymenocallis is a beautiful flower, prized not only for its appearance but also for its wonderful fragrance, which is often strongest after sunset.

 

Hymenocallis has a tropical appearance when grown in containers. A blooming green garden on the veranda not only refreshes but also gives your home a pleasant look.

 

 

 

 

 

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Prishvin's Stories: Beginning of Autumn

Short stories about the nature of the autumn season by Mikhail  Prishvin , a Russian novelist (1873 -1954),  in the form of notes convey that touching mood of romance and pleasant sadness.

"Today at dawn one lush birch stepped out of the forest into the clearing, and another, timid, thin, dropped leaf after leaf onto the dark fir tree. Following this, as the dawn grew brighter and brighter, different trees began to appear to me differently. This always happens at the beginning of autumn, when after a lush and common summer a great change begins and all the trees begin to experience leaf fall differently.

I looked around. Here is a hummock, combined by the paws of black grouse. Previously, you would certainly find a feather of a black grouse or a wood grouse in the hole of such a hummock, and if it was speckled, you knew that a female had dug, if black - a rooster. Now in the holes of the combined hummocks lie not the feathers of birds, but fallen yellow leaves. And here is an old, old russula, huge, like a plate, all red, and the edges curled up from old age, and in the dish floats a yellow birch leaf.

Autumn dew has fallen. Flies are knocking on the ceiling. Sparrows are flocked. Rooks are in the harvested fields. Magpies graze in families on the roads. The dews are cold, gray. Another dewdrop in the axil of a leaf sparkles all day long".

As a child, I read many of Prishvin's stories about nature. Do you think his descriptions match the beginning of autumn in your area? 

 

 

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Nimphaeas

 Today I want to show you some photos from the botanical garden's conservatory. I especially liked the pool with lots of water lilies and lotuses. These are photos from my archive, reminding me of the wonderful time spent among the beautiful plants of the botanical garden.

 

A little history. In 1915, the New Botanical Garden on the outskirts of Munich opened to visitors. Over time, it has grown to 21 hectares. The garden has glass greenhouses and open areas among ponds and marshy water bodies. The diversity of flora and the distance from the noisy center attract wild birds, insects and amphibians to the garden that you will not see in other city parks.

 

Separate pavilions are reserved for aquatic plants. Thus, in one of them there is a pond for Victoria amazonica - the largest water lily in the world. In another pavilion, a mangrove forest has been recreated with a pond in which carp and other fish swim. From December to March, butterflies are released into the tropical greenhouse, which flutter very close, at arm's length.

Look at the water lilies (nymphaea) and lotuses in the pool. Their large round leaves can support a small weight. 

Have you ever been to the conservatory of the botanical garden?

Cameos

I want to show you cameos. When I could walk well (not like I walk now:(( I went to the museum to take pictures of cameos. They were, of course, behind glass, I hope this did not affect the quality of the photos. 

 

 

 

A cameo is a type of carved semi-precious stone with a convex relief image. Cameos were used as miniature jewelry in ancient times. Wealthy Greeks and Romans wore them exclusively for beauty, as especially valuable works of jewelry art. The most famous cameos come from the city of Alexandria in Egypt, created in the 3rd century BC. 

 

 

Ancient craftsmen skillfully used the multi-layered nature of semi-precious stones, using contrasts of color layers, from dark brown to bluish-gray and white, in several reliefs. By varying the thickness of the upper layer of the stone, through which the lower layer, usually of a darker color, shone through, a skilled craftsman achieved the effect of combining relief and light and shade in the image. 

 

 

 

 

These beautiful cameos are just decorations, but they introduce us to the faces of that distant era, to the life of people. I hope you liked one of the cameos. Perhaps some of you have cameos at home that are family memories or you have recently acquired them. Tell us!