Good point. I hope you told him what he was missing!

Great pic with so many textures. Thanks for taking the time. Be sure to use it in the "Patterns III" thread in the Name That Plant forum when I start it later this month. ;-)

tj

Beautiful and one of those precious fleeting pictures that are only exposed to those that take the time to look. Thanks for sharing.

Annabelle with caps of snow

Oh, brrrrf!!!!

What a beautiful spot!

I went around and cut off alot of blooms on the ones I had left with blooms. With the recent snowfall, half of them already had snapped off, so I decided to just go full circle and remove all the blooms to mitigate undue damage

I don't know where you are a1an, or what your varieties are, but most of mine haven't had any issues with snow breaking branches. Perhaps you have chosen some of the types with huge, dense flower heads and less stout branches.

In my garden occasionally Annabelle gets damaged by huge globs of snow slamming down from the roof and some winters the voles eat off all the bark under the snow, but Annabelle is fine getting chopped off to ground level in spring. None of my H. paniculatas, Quickfire, White Diamond, Fire and Ice, and Pinky Winky, have ever had any breakage in my garden through heavy snow, ice storms, etc. over 9 years. All my H. serrata and H. macrophylla varieties die back to the snow line, regardless, so I have to prune come spring. We get anywhere from a foot or two to over ten feet of snow annually.

I don't know what other folks' experience are with snow and winter hydrangea flowers. Like escolat, I remove my previous year's flower heads in early spring.

I’m about 1/2 mile or less from the water so most of not all the snow I get is wet and dense . Heh, I wouldn’t mind 2 feet of DRY powdery stuff than the dense stuff I get. That sorta compounds the problem ya know.

LOL, I always look forward to the 1st 2-3 snowfalls. Get to run the snowblower and BLOW some snow. Then I just can't wait for spring to come around and start counting the days ;-

Heh, which reminds me. At some point, I'm going to have to start putting the winter roofs on some of my boxwoods. It's knarly as he11, but it mitigates having splayed winter boxwoods come springtime

So glad to be reminded that hydrangeas that bloom do look good in winter. Becsuse when they don't they are dreadful. I won't post pictures of mine this year!

Oh, man. Consider yourself, kitasei, a comrade in arms. Sigh, down here, many poor mopheads had their flower buds zapped on Jan 5th when temps cratered after weeks of mild winter so, many of the old-wood only mopheads had no blooms whatsoever. ;o(

Only the mopheads in protected locations and rebloomers had any blooms (and oakleafs, paniculatas and arborescens, of course). It is good to have some hydrangea varieties just in case this happens and sooooomeone has forgotten to winter protect. Oops. Yes, it was mea culpa. I can't believe I forgot. LOL!!! Ha!

Sorry to hear about your splayed boxwoods, a1an. I have to admit that I have not seen that problem here because of my mild winters. But I have heard of it. What are all the solutions that you have tried before to this splaying problem (things that worked or did not)?

The splaying is mainly due to my own erroneous ways. The heart want's what it want as they say. In this area, I have a long row of green velvets. There is a bluestone pathway that I snowblow during the winter and due to limited spacing.....sometimes snow get's put in the area where the boxwoods are inadvertently. With the already dense snow as is, running it through the auger/impelling and removing all the air of it makes it even more denser..

Fashion vs. function I suppose.

a1an, you could use stakes and wire mesh fencing on both sides which would allow you to still enjoy the plants in winter without losing the visible green while giving the boxwoods support to prevent splaying.

The other day I passed a yard which had completely wrapped the arborvitaes in burlap, which in this area means that they have 5 months of ugly wrappings. Can't understand planting evergreens in those circumstances.

NhBabs

Never did dawn on me to build a strutural wall support in the fashion u mentioned !

Heh, isn’t the whole thing about arbs. Is that they stay green in all seasons :-)