The Snow is Sticking

It happens every year, yet each year it comes as a surprise: the first significant snowfall in which the snow sticks. Today was that day. A very wet, heavy snow that covered sidewalks and made surfaces slick. Ugh!

The first flakes on the beech

Even though there is absolutely no reason to be caught off guard by this annual event, I often feel caught off guard. That feeling inspired a short poem.

The Snow is Sticking

the snow is sticking
and I am kicking
myself
not yet done 
tucking in the garden

flakes catch and linger
on frozen gloved fingers
yours truly
not yet prepared
for winter's glacial glare

Snow on Bloodgood Japanese Maple

Here's hoping for a mercifully mild and brief winter. Nothing to do in the meantime but write some garden poems and count down to spring.

Happy Gardening! 

Autumn in My Dustpan

This time of year in the garden always amounts to a lot of leaf cleanup. Weeks and weeks (and more weeks) of leaf cleanup. 

A carpet of colourful fallen leaves

I have too many leaves. The garden is surrounded by mature trees that dump their loads of foliage each fall. The cover is so thick that it has the potential to smother everything underneath. So I do my best to manage the leaves. I mulch as many as I can, and I leave the shredded remnants to do their work as a warm, nourishing, and protective winter blanket for the garden. The rest, I rake and sweep into bags that will be taken away to be turned into compost.

Fallen leaves have been a topic of discussion among the gardeners I follow on twitter. I saw a post that returned to me as I was doing my own leaf clean up. It was a picture of a dustpan filled with fallen leaves. It was accompanied by the caption "Autumn in a dustpan." I did a quick search to see if anyone had ever written a poem inspired by those words because they struck me as rather poetic. I didn't find any poems, but I did find dozens of high-resolution stock photos to match the words (who knew that the world needed so many dustpan photos? Lol!) This, in turn, inspired my own picture (see below), and a new poem in the form of a pantoum.

Autumn in my Dustpan   

Autumn in my dustpan
The season not yet done
Fallen golds and crimsons
Echo a blazing sun

A garden season nearly done
Fades into dimmer days
Echoes of a blazing sun
Obscured by skies of grey

Faded into dimmer days
Life hindered by the dark
Beneath fall’s slow decay
A soul’s diminished spark

Life hindered by the dark
Leaves rain upon the land
Sweep up fall’s slow decay
Gather autumn in my dust pan

Autumn in my dustpan

Here's to the annual fall cleanup.  I hope yours is going well.

Happy Gardening.