30 knot winds tonight with driving rain and a flood warning until mid-day tomorrow. We’re expecting 20′ waves and the shore roads are closed to traffic. This is a big, slow moving storm and the ground is still frozen – water is streaming down our dirt road to make a muddy delta on the highway. Almost all of our snow has melted away, leaving the brown and gray landscape that will stay with us until greening begins in April.
It’s a long time till April, so I’m posting pictures of the snow from my daily companion sketchbook. The landscape won’t look like that again until we come full circle around the sun.
They also mitigate our harsh climate, parceling out the change from 10 degrees to 40 over the course of a January afternoon into smaller, gentler increments.
Some of the rocks are spectacular specimens all on their own. . .
. . . and some are simply a sturdy, not unattractive place to put your foot while weeding.
I found this beautiful pale upright while digging a carrot bed. It has taken a few years of wind and weather to expose its true colors.
Heath and heather require top-notch drainage. In this climate it’s not even the cold that kills these plants, it is wet roots and layers of clay. I dig a fairly deep hole (2′ for a 4″ pot) and fill it with large rocks and sand before planting a member of this family in a peaty hollow at the surface. My oldest plants have survived 15 winters here and thrived.
This rock isn’t really visible in the summer, hedged in by daylilies and Bouncing Bet. In this season it’s sculpture.
Bar Harbor streets are old and narrow – even more so when the ice and snow build up along the edges. Some houses can only be seen from straight on, so I have an entire series from “across the street”.