Winter Protection Is Here

The greens from the house went outside to be laid over a bed of bulbs and a rosebush, and the snow did fall, and fall, and fall. It's not cold, though. We're barely under freezing. I like walking the dog a lot better in days like this, even if we have to carry the shovel with us to make the path we walk on. So the wonderful protection of heaps of snow that would protect all those poppies is sure to be gone long before they no longer need it.

There's nothing much sticking up over the snow.

Those poppies were still heaped together and happy up til they got their blanket. Even the sweet peas were still there, still green, or greenish.

Some poppies are really tall, standing five feet and blazing at the onlooker even if they're all the way across the garden. I know a poppy bed with crambe at its other end. I grow dwarf poppies that stand about two and half feet tall, and bloom very profusely, that I bought bareroot from Bluestone some years ago. They've been so reliable I don't worry about them. But these horned poppies that were expected to be annuals are the ones I'm watching. For one thing, I've never seen them bloom, and I had expected them to be relatively thin little guys like the annual California poppy that seeds itself. Instead, their leaves are longer than my hand and a beautiful color of blue-green. They look great in a little vase when I cut them, and if they had water, they'd persist in the vase for weeks.

Some kinds of things are called horned because they have spurs on their stems. I so wish that these guys will survive to show me what they're going to look like.

Peonies I'm not worried about. They have discreetly withdrawn long since, and they won't poke their red tips out for months. Snow, no snow, it's not gonna discourage peonies. One year, I discouraged some by putting new composted mulch on them too deeply; so they don't flower if they become too deeply covered. But they seem to be a bit like bulbs, they can rearrange their depth for themselves if they have to.

Bulbs? This may be a funny year for them, because I believe I saw the tips of tulips just the day or two before the snow fell. If they get up too far, and then have a bad hot and cold time, they'll be twisty looking and warped. But those are ones I put in last fall, a couple hundred of them, and they don't have any sense yet of the weather they're in. The older ones never peeped.