Season's Greetings

Happy northern temperate autumn!

Or, actually, any season.

Spring-looking crocuses, with winter-looking berries, on a bright summer's day in autumn.

These photos were taken on a recent trip to Kew Gardens. More photos from Kew

Season's Greetings

Season's Greetings! Happy Northern-Hemisphere temperate summer to you all!

Various plant photos, again.

- I still can't remember what this plant is, but it's come back nicely since last year.

- I really like these large daisies. (I've no idea if they're actually daisies, or just look a bit like them)

Coming up later in summer ...
- sunflowers!

Season's Greetings

Season's Greetings! Northern-Hemisphere temperate summer to you all! (and some cheerful plant photos to make a change from the gloomy news recently)

The first daffodil of spring - well, in our garden anyway - exactly one year on from the first daffodil of last spring.

Some other flowers are coming out rather faster this year - these anenomes for instance.

Season's greetings

Season's Greetings! Early Northern-Hemisphere temperate winter to you all! I was expecting it to be January before there was any snow settling, so this has been a bit of a surprise.

There's almost a foot of snow fallen here, with more forecast overnight and later in the week. Other parts of the northeast are basically blocked off.

Heavy snow that settles to any sort of depth is a rarity in most parts of England and Wales, so the contingency plans for it are generally insufficient to keep all but a few main roads operating (because to do so would require spending money on buying, maintaining and storing lots of road-clearing equipment and supplies that would rarely be used). Unfortunately that means that when it does happen lots of people - not, in general, the default privileged ones - end up trapped in their homes.

Season's Greetings

Season's Greetings! Happy Northern-Hemisphere temperate autumn to you all!

Taken at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh. Some other photos from the gardens are on Flickr (not all of them particularly autumnal in tone).

Season's Greetings!

Season's Greetings! Happy Northern-Hemisphere temperate summer to you all!

The last two months have not generally been filled with good news, so it's time for some more plant photos.

Most plants we've done have only seemed to really come into full flower the year after they've been planted, but the foxglove has really grown rapidly in its first year. The roots are binding the soil together nicely, too.

The pansies are still doing well. We planted these just before winter to get some late autumn colour. Most of them survived the winter, and they've been flowering very strongly since spring. These yellow ones are especially nice.

The scabious is one that basically sat there doing nothing last year - I think we planted it a little too late. This year it's put out these really long stalks with lovely pink flowers on the end, and though it's not particularly clear from the photo, some more purple ones on shorter shoots.

I've forgotten exactly what these blue-purple flowers are, but there's now a lovely mat of them across the wall and another at the front of the flower bed.

Season's Greetings

The first daffodil of spring is finally flowering in our garden...

...though it looks like there might be another long wait before the second.

In the UK, "Season's Greetings" is often used as an apparently non-religious statement around Christmas time. It perhaps provides an alternative for those culturally-Christian atheists and agnostics who don't actually want their card to explicitly mention Christmas, but of course the default of "Christian" (cultural rather than theological) ends up reinforced because you can only get "Season's Greetings" cards for winter. And only the start of it, around the Christian and secular celebrations of Christmas and the nearby secular celebrations of Gregorian New Year.

So, Season's Greetings, those of you who are also experiencing a temperate climate's northern hemisphere Spring.