What beautiful pics, they brighten a cold winter day.

apart from the snowdrops, the first hemerocallis leaves are a special aspect of the spring awakening. So fresh, so green, it almost renders the blooms irrelevant. So far this year, my garden is terminally confused - not least because the salvias and osteos are still blooming away. Annoyingly, I like to get in and have a good clear out of the old foliage so I can mulch around the bulbs and perennials with my luscious compost (compost mania has struck since the huge new compost bays were built last year - 4 x 2mx2m bays with a decent timber structure, unlike the wired together pallettes which have done for the last 9 years), The ferns and epimediums are fresh and green and I have not even removed the old hellebore foliage yet. There will be a lot of leaf stripping on the roses too. Primulas, especially my treasured auriculas and beesianums, have bloomed throughout the year (there is a clump of violet ones out at present)and I am holding my breath for the flowering quince to do its scarlet thing against the black timber rose supports. Oh yes, getting very excited indeed. Now, to more mundane matters of ordering the seed potatoes and vegetable seeds, having planted the new bare root fruit trees (a late cherry, more raspberries, another almond and a new ribes aureum called a fourberry (new to me). The promise of garden bounty (and the hassle of picking and jamming, I suppose) always gets the blood flowing a bit faster.

Hi amimee: I love your spring pictures, please keep them coming. They are inspirational!

Here we're having a drought and I'm looking at a two acre garden and several hundred roses and thinking about how much cleanup I have to do in the coming months, much of it, I hope, before spring arrives. If we're even going to have a spring. The weather went crazy starting last April and has never returned to normal since. Now it's time to weed, mulch, and prune. My weeding specialty this year is digging up dock with my fork, then adding old/rotten hay to the hole when I put the dirt back. We must have millions of dock plants. I don't know how well the amendment plan will work. I have a powerful suspicion that I won't be finished by late March, but such cleanup as I do get done is satisfying, especially in places that haven't seen any serious attention for a couple of years. Hurrah for old hay! I can mulch all I want.

The thought of spring is disconcerting because we haven't yet had any winter. Normally winter is dark and chilly and wet and miserable, with the snow appropriate to this land of apples and lilacs, but this year we've had a steady run of cool sunny weather, even warm when the sun is high. Yesterday I saw two blooms on 'Isabella Sprunt'! In January! How can spring emerge from this confusion? For those of you who are having an honest winter, congratulations! And remember,

"When winter comes, can spring be far behind?" (Shelley)

Melissa

Aimee, I know exactly how you feel since it hasn't been that long since my garden was new. Yours will certainly be much better this spring than last and after that every year will only get better as your plants mature and you start to replace (if you're anything like me that is) the poor performers with better roses.

Melissa, it's been the same here, temperatures up to 83 degrees, no rain, some of my irises are blooming, as are quite a few of the roses. I know our climates are very different, but even so this should be the season of much lower temperatures and rain. I don't know whether we're seeing the effects of global warming or something else at work but it is disconcerting.

Ingrid

I'm looking forward to spring too but I have a lot longer to wait. I won't see any bulbs pushing up until March probably (although for some weird reason I have some daffs trying to come up now!). Roses will start to wake up in April. Now if I can just hold on that long!

I agree with Melissa and Ingrid that this warm weather isn't right. We got down to below 10 degrees for only one night, and it will shoot up to 47 degrees today (compared that to below zero last year). It's a dry winter with no snow. I'm saving my used kitchen water to water my 10 Austins - the nursery said to water them twice a month in the winter.

There's forecasts of more drought for Texas, and drought for England. Here in Chicagoland we had drought in 2004-2005, and there was only 5.6" of snow in 2003, compared to 22" of snow in 2010 for January. If this winter stays dry, we are heading toward a drought everywhere.

I can't figure out if we are in early Spring here, or just a continuation of Fall. We certainly don't seem to be in WInter! My garden has been neglected for the last 6 months - I am planning on getting out into it to do all of my "Fall cleanup" and "Winter Pruning" all at once! Meanwhile, the tea & china roses just keep blooming and blooming, bulbs are coming up, my old Iris are blooming, etc. I even saw, at a nearby college, that their large old banksie lutea bushes have started to bloom (definitely a Spring phenom!). I checked mine, and they have not started yet, but they don't get as much sun.

Here is a picture of my Burbank (or Santa Rosa?) china rose, covered with fallen leaves, surrounded by the end of the bloom of the Mexican sage (salvia leucantha), and still blooming!

Jackie

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I'm not excited. We haven't had any winter rain yet. If we don't get some soon, it's not going to be much of a spring.

Rosefolly