Magical winter gardens
It’s been such a strange winter — unseasonably mild, very little snow and ice. One weatherman went so far as to suggest we were experiencing a “Vancouverlike winter.” Not that I’m complaining, I can live with the moderate temperatures. Maybe because we’ve had so little real winter, each snowfall has become a special event. When the garden is dusted in elegant white snowflakes, I can’t resist heading out to capture the scene with my camera.
To the uninitiated, this may seem like a futile exercise. If you’ve seen one winter garden, you’ve seen them all, right? Nothing could be farther from the truth — there are many valuable lessons to learn in the winter garden.
Dusted in fresh snow, the winter garden is transformed from sombre shades of brown and grey to refreshing shades white, from sparkling white, to silver, blue and even shades of warm amber — it all depends on the reflected light.
I like to watch the garden transform from mundane to spectacular, as the snow falls. Dusted with snowflakes, the feathery plumes of miscanthus grass are transformed into delicate fairy-like wands. On closer inspection, each inflorescence has fluffy, seed pods arranged along the length of a gracefully arching stem. The stems resemble miniature sheafs of golden wheat, covered with tiny filaments. Each minute hair seems to be designed to capture and then suspend individual snowflakes, that will glitter when lit by a ray of sunlight or the glow of a silvery moon.
On a recent evening, the garden was first sprinkled with mist, and then dusted with tiny snowflakes. Every surface appeared to be sugarcoated. Gentle clouds of tiny snowflakes seemed to hang in the air, filtering the harsh light from the nearby street corner and gently illuminating the whole garden, like a special effect from a movie scene.
The arching branches of the old crabapple tree were gracefully iced with snow, the pointy red birdhouse perched on the crook of a branch, wore a frosted-white roof and porch, upright clumps of Northern sea oats, brightened with a dusting of white, seemed to dance around the feet of a massive cedar bush. Along the fence line, a row of hornbeams glistened in shades of silveryblue against the golden tones of the snow-rimmed fence and a ring of fluffy miscanthus grass in the circle garden. A flat white carpet of snow covered the lawn, unifying the whole composition. I set up my tripod and spent a glorious hour capturing this magical scene. By sunrise, the backyard was back to its ho-hum self.
I recently set out to explore the arboretum at the Niagara Parks Botanical Garden, an hour before sunset. The wind had settled for the evening, the sylvan setting was muffled with a blanket of snow — it was perfectly silent. A family of white birch trees, clustered into groups along the length of an open meadow, created an elegant avenue of winter whites set against a backdrop of sombre conifers. Creamy white, copper and chocolate brown coloured the scene, reminding me of an old-fashioned Currier and Ives etching. A single tree with outstretched limbs bore several creamy white icicles. Each icicle was shaped like the blade of a wide kitchen knife — very wide where they clung to the branch for support, thinning down to a tiny droplet of water at their tip. The snow beneath this tree was perforated with tiny holes, possibly from water (or sap) dripping from the branches.
Just as I packed up my gear, the sun dipped beneath the faceless clouds and painted the horizon a spectacular shade of orange. For a glorious moment, the sun warmed the woodland with glints of cinnamon, gold and copper. Golden light gilded the slats of a wooden bench and the tips of the needles of a lumbering pine tree, before it slipped out of sight. It was as if Mother nature wanted to show me that even a humble woodland could be spectacular, if I just stood still for a moment or two, to be more aware and absorb the details of the moment.