Spring migratory birds in the Garden I suspect that anyone reading this journal entry will already be aware of the pleasure we take in enticing birds to visit our garden. This week has proved to be the (slightly delayed) peak week for northwards migration soy can feast your eyes on some of the [...]
Text here Amelanchier canadensis A delayed spring that is cooler and wetter than normal is producing spectacular tree blossom everywhere. Text here Magnolia sp. We planted this tree twenty years ago in the "hope" that is would establish itself. As you can see, it had [...]
Busy week ... This has been an exceptionally busy week for an unemployed chap (doing the tax returns for example) and so I have little on the gardening or wildlife front with which to regale you this Sunday noontime. That is not to say there have not been achievements, for example the annual [...]
Spring approaches To Ponder ... "to consider or examine attentively or deliberately. Ponder implies a careful weighing of a problem or, often, prolonged inconclusive thinking about a matter." Mr. Badger here. At last we are into March, next weekend the clocks go forward and soon my customary winter hibernation will be broken by warmer [...]
We returned earlier in the week from a couple of weeks in very-springy England to find that there were few leaves on the trees here but that garden buds were swelling. Now, four days later you can almost watch the leaves pinging open, change is happening so fast. The grass is visibly growing and [...]
The seasons are now finally turning in reality and just as written in stone on the calendar. Pretty cold start of the week and a day of quite heavy freezing rain (latest FR in Montreal for 70 years apparently) but things started to warm up by Friday and better still as this is written [...]
This week the garden is hanging onto the cusp between late winter and (very) early spring - the sun, when it appears, is quite warm but the air is not at all warm and when the wind blows, especially off the river which is still frozen, it is decidedly cold. Last week we wrote [...]
There have been "signs" of hopefully approaching spring for a couple of weeks but now as March ends there are genuine signs which nobody can ignore. For a start, there is considerable melting of the snow and free water in the garden pond, the sun has genuine warmth in it even if the air [...]
Spring arrived this week around 12:30pm on the 20th, to be exact. The vernal equinox. It was also -8C that day and plenty of snow, albeit thinning snow, on the ground. The current weather forecast predicts several centimetres more snow in a week or so and a generally cold April to come. On the [...]
This deserves a post all to itself ... In the the final days of February 2017 the first SNOWDROP appeared in the garden. This year, despite careful looking, we didn't see any signs of snowdrop growth until Monday 5 March but as soon as the partial thaw had reduced the snow under the Katsura [...]