The Rocky Mountain English Country Sculpture Garden ~ Tour 6 ~ November and December, 2012

Welcome to The Colorado Rocky Mountain English Country Sculpture Garden

Tour 6 ~ November & December, 2012

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Winter’s Waiting Game

With each passing night the ice grows thicker.

For a short while, after enduring the first ice-cold blasts of the onrushing winter, the garden, indeed the entire landscape, looks to have been put on hold. Bitter cold days at this time of the year can still be interspersed with quite balmy mid afternoon weather, but when the thermometer does decide to dive I can tell you from ten consecutive winters of experience that November and December can muster up some record breaking cold nights and register the lowest low temperatures of the entire winter. Many a time over the years the temperature has dropped to 10 or even 20 below Fahrenheit ( that’s a punishing 40 to 50 degrees of frost) with the calendar still showing November.

Quite often these late autumn/early winter days are so still you could cut the air with a knife.

But by the time December really shifts into gear it’s just a matter of time before the season’s permasnow arrives and everyone, and everything, can settle down for a good long winter, for there is no doubt that when the temperature gets as cold as it does around here it always seems a damn sight colder without the thick blanket of protection that the snow provides, and as a gardener I fear the damaged caused to my plants at this time of the year more than at any other… for without their snow the poor little things are often mere lambs to the icy slaughter. However, when the snow arrives and they are all tucked in survival through to next spring becomes a distinct possibility for the plants and critters alike.

At last, the first real snow of winter. Now it’s so cold that a blanket will form and protect The Colorado Rocky Mountain English Country Sculpture Garden for another bitter high elevation winter.

It’s almost remarkable the way the snow arrives each year right on cue. One minute everyone is bleating about there being none, the next they’re putting their backs out shoveling it. It’s always the same – absolutely no snow to show for until Thanksgiving, and then just enough to get the slopes open, then nothing till Christmas Eve (I kid you not), then, as if Hollywood had dropped by to stage it, gorgeous puffy white clouds of it swirling down from the skies in flakes the size of rabbit tails.

Elky, as always, sees the amusing side of his predicament.

So, while there may not be too much to look at in the garden at this time of the year (rather like its spring counterweight, April on the other side) but since we all know what is just around the corner we can sit back, relax, and enjoy the incredible show that is about to begin; the winteriest wonderland you will ever see!