December GBBD: Winter Has Arrived!

Blogging has taken a back seat lately to Christmas preparations and activities.  For some reason it seems to have taken me twice as long this year to decorate the house and get the Christmas shopping done.  Instead of reading blogs, time on the computer has been spent searching through photo files for a photo calendar for my parents, updating Christmas addresses, and online shopping including trying to figure out just what  "Paper Jam" and "Zoobles" are (both requests from two of the grandchildren).  But I didn't want to miss out on the monthly celebration of Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, hosted by Carol who is probably greeting everyone this season with a hearty "hoe, hoe, hoe!"

Blooms are pretty sparse at my house this time of year.  The only indoor plant worth noting is the Christmas poinsettia purchased just this past weekend.  Although the white poinsettias I saw were lovely and quite tempting, I opted for the traditional red one in the end.  But either red or white was preferable to the other choices I saw for sale--glittery gold or orange and even blue!  Somehow a blue poinsettia just doesn't fit my image of Christmas.

This fall I was lulled into thinking our nice weather would last forever and waited too long to bring some plants indoors.  The only plants that actually made it inside before the first hard frost were the impatiens.  This yellow Fusion impatiens is pretty leggy, but at least it is holding on to a few blooms.

Outdoors, of course, is another story--nothing is blooming under the cover of white snow.  However, I did notice something strange a couple of weeks ago--there appeared to be a few pink blooms on one of the crabapple trees.  This photo was actually taken over a week ago when our first snow fell, and it's been too cold the past few days to see if the blooms are still there.  While the pink bloom against white snow may seem like a happy incongruity, I'm afraid it may not be a good sign after all, and may mean this tree is under some stress.

Like many parts of the country, we have had our share of frigid cold and strong winds the past few days.  Fortunately, we did not get as much snow as some areas, but the winds blew what snow we had into whiteout conditions with windchills well below zero.  Needless to say, I'm not venturing out into the garden these days!

For some real blooms across the world, do check out the posts at Carol's .. . and stay warm, everyone!