Snow Days

The snow has been falling for four days now with gleeful accumulation, unless you're a cat. Then you're going stir crazy and making your humans a little bonkers, but I digress. What I notice about the snow, from a designer's perspective, is that it shows you nothing but form and line. This is a helpful and refreshing view as there are so few distractions. Only the backbones stand out in the space in question.

We are surrounded by a huge expanse of wooded ravine. Right now each and every branch and twig on 100's of trees is wearing a cloak of snow accentuating the lines of the forest. It shows off the depth of the woods, both on a horizontal and vertical plane. This monochromatic view keeps me mindful of the strong role the lines of the forest play in my garden's overall design. This perspective just isn't available without the snow.

Another thing the snow does is visually obliterate small things. One is left seeing the larger elements, the items that have strong impressionable form in our gardens. Today I see Western Hemlocks, the Doug Fir that the house was built around, an overly ambitious Kwanzan Cherry that will change the light quality with its massive pink bloom when this snow is a mere memory, arbors we've built for anniversaries, a small yet stunning stand of Birch, a Silver Maple that was passed off as a Cinnamon Bark Maple and needs to come out and the big grey tent where we store cord wood. Not everything is aesthetically wonderful even though it maybe functional. The snow helps me to realize I must do something about the tent. A couple of Clematis Montana will eagerly soften its utilitarian look along with a tall, narrow, fast growing something along the front corner for the vine to scramble up.

While us die hard gardeners miss having our hands in the dirt when the world is taken to white, snow has its uses and can help us see things we might not otherwise.