Today, it's cloudy and cold with little hope for sunshine.  The Christmas tree is nearly down and packed away, and the red dirt kids returned to school.  I took a hot tea break at my kitchen table and watched the birds having their morning snack. My winter favorites are the acrobatic Cardinals.  All throughout the Christmas season, I kept seeing Cardinals on everything in sight.   On ornaments, sweaters, note cards, and china plates, the Cardinals, embroidered, painted and sequeined, gazed contentedly from various surfaces. The real deal looks a bit watchful and perturbed.  Who can blame her?  It's cold, and she's trying to eat. Although I enjoyed seeing their copied forms, the real ones visiting the feeders on the back deck cheered my post-holiday heart. A few facts courtesy of National Geographic's website. Cardinals live an average of fifteen years. They are about the size of a teacup.  No wonder...

Like I wrote in Part I, May and June were all about the roses and the daylilies.  The garden behind my house is a very traditional English cottage style garden.  It departs from the English ideal with its fencing of split rail and chicken wire.  The chicken wire is at the base and is barely noticeable.  It helps to keep the hungry bunnies from eating everything green in early spring.  Due to breaks in the fence, I still get a bunny or two.  For some reason (knock on wood), the deer don't like this garden.  They like everything else in the yard.  Perhaps, that is due to all of the super thorny roses like 'New Dawn' growing along the fence.  Maybe the arbors confuse them. During May, I shared all my rosey secrets. I introduced you to the Austins, but told you that if I planted a new rose garden,...

At the Entering of the New Year by Thomas Hardy I (Old Style) Our songs went up and out the chimney, And roused the home-gone husbandmen; Our allemands, our heys, poussettings, Our hands-across and back again, Sent rhythmic throbbings through the casements On to the white highway, Where nighted farers paused and muttered, "Keep it up well, do they!" The contrabasso's measured booming Sped at each bar to the parish bounds, To shepherds at their midnight lambings, To stealthy poachers on their rounds; And everybody caught full duly The notes of our delight, As Time unrobed the Youth of Promise Hailed by our sanguine sight. II (New Style) We stand in the dusk of a pine-tree limb, As if to give ear to the muffled peal, Brought or withheld at the breeze's whim; But our truest heed is to words that steal From the mantled ghost that looms in the...

Kind of like Time Magazine's "Year in Pictures" only with a lot less funding. It is traditional to reflect upon the year nearly gone before thinking about the one to come.  What worked and what did not.  What stands out as the best of the year, and what was the worst. For me, December was all about Advent and Christmas.  Getting ready for the big day.  It was fun, but I am still exhausted by the preparations.  Even so, rose care was also on my mind. In November, grateful for the freedoms we all enjoy, I took an rose inventory, discovering that instead of ninety roses, I have eighty-three.  Where did the other twelve go?  To the great compost bin in the sky.  One great truism is that throughout a gardener's life, many plants come, and many plants die. I finished planting the front garden, although I'm still not happy...