Even winter gardens bring me joy

Happy New Year Everyone!! I know that I welcome 2011 with open arms and can't wait to see what this year brings me. December was a little bit of a wonky month here...Eric had yet another back surgery early in the month and it was another spinal fusion. So, December was more or less a loss month for me between getting measurements done for winter projects, being a caretaker, having a revolving door for family visiting Eric and lastly the holidays. I did manage to run out and take some neat pics of the yard on this one spectacularly sunny (but frigid) morning right after Eric came home from the hospital.

The strawberries in the glazed strawberry pots...I loved the color of the foliage against the color of the container. I learned something about squirrels and strawberries...they will eat the leaves if they are hungry enough. Who knew...

The sun gave me some wonderful effects with the plants in the yard like this Leucothoe 'Nana' next to Lake Larson. I like this plant and I have tried it with mixed success in both my yard and client's yards. I have two rainbow Leucothoe in different places in the yard and they have some dieback on them. They don't like exposed spaces and so places with wind are out of the question. They really do like a protected, wooded place to call home.

The bold seed heads of my Black Fountain Grass...I'm ready to pull the countless volunteers from this plant in the spring. This plant seeds like crazy and I'm sure I mentioned it before. But, it's not so evil I'll yank it out. I think dividing it is on the menu for this spring.

I do love my winter hydrangeas...I think they are as pretty in the winter as they are in the summer.

My Lavender scoffs at the cold weather and continues to look wonderful (not so much now after a foot of heavy snow though.)

This rose floored me this winter...it held it's shape and color until about a week for before Christmas. (It looks like hell now. LOL) But it stayed in suspended animation for weeks in front of the kitchen window. I wrestled with should I cut it and bring it in or not for as long as it looked good. I decided against it because I was sure it was going to disintegrate inside once it thawed.

Sun makes Japanese Silver Feather Maiden Grass glow even this time of year.

Everyone asks me about the wet pets and this time of year and how to they make it in the pond in the winter. When I took this photo...there was about a good inch of ice on the Lake. They just hang out and move around slowly throughout the pond. They will seek out areas under the ice where the sun hits the Lake and then when it goes away, they go back to the deep side. We do have a heater and the air stone running to keep two holes in the ice so gas exchange can happen. If we didn't do that...they would die due to lack of oxygen. But they hang and lounge around until spring under there.

We kept the little waterfall running until we got ice dams on it and the water start to flow around them. We started to get some serious water running out of the falls and into the garden around it. I shut them down for the winter right before I snapped these last two photos. It's too bad I can't run them the entire winter because I love the look of iced up waterfalls...both man-made and natural ones.