Electric Green

I love the Alps in winter. The Christmas card scenery is glorious (and the fact that, physically, skiing can take you from zero to hero in a week flat appeals as well). But despite floral spring joys to come, a metre of snow renders the place pretty sterile so it was a pleasure to drive back down into valleys clad in an opalescent mist, trees fresh with dusted ice and bearing dense clumps of mistletoe. And fascinating geology, strata of rock like puff pastry all folded and twisted, mistreated and left to petrify. According to Terry Pratchett, any CD left in the car for long enough will eventually metamorphose into a Best of Queen compilation. While this was not strictly the case, as we approached northern France, after about 1300 miles, there was a definite rock anthem theme developing. In fact I think we have a small breeding population. Perhaps if we add Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, or similar, we might get an F1 generation that is rock opera without any need for Andrew Lloyd-Webber…...

It snowed again yesterday. For a while, white clumps hung in the trees like frosted magnolias, but it is now starting to melt. Some real winter flowers like Lonicera fragrantissima are a bit scorched and the Zantedeschia aetheopica has gone all mushy (this never happened in London!) although I expect it will all bounce back. Maybe this year I will actually get around to digging the pond and bog garden I have been planning. The Zantedeschia is in a big pot but it might be more resilient in the ground. It is pretty easy to make a garden look exciting in spring, but January is a different issue altogether. There are some performers though, I need to get a Hamamelis mollis and Daphne bholua (see picture) smells lovely, but it is also poisonous so I might wait until the children are past the chewing things stage. Or see if there is space in the front garden. A couple of jackdaws have been lurking around on the roof, looking suspiciously down the chimneys. The chimneysweep tells me that...