What a difference in a month! It beginning to look like spring although it sure hasn’t been feeling like it. Temperatures have been mostly single digits C (seldom above 50 F).
A closer view this month
The trees are still pretty bare, but the grass is green and growing and the daffodils that we actually sodded over last year have returned. This brings me much joy.
In contrast, a friend helped me plant close to 200 daffodil bulbs in this new garden last fall. They were meant to fill the garden with a swath of yellow, and spill out onto the lawn (which they have done.) What a disappointment they have proved to be.
A work in progress
What’s in your garden right now? Are the spring flowers in your part of the world all finished?
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I haven’t posted for six months. Mostly, it’s because I’ve been busy with many things including back surgery. But I had to compare this spring here in Nova Scotia with last spring – and any of the other 17 springs we’ve lived here. Yesterday morning was sunny! And warm! (well, relatively: nearly 10 degrees C / 50 F) It was a lovely day to spot clean a wool carpet and let it dry on the back deck.
There’s not much green showing in the photo, but trust me, there’s a whole lot of budding going on w-a-y earlier than usual.
The other (bigger) reason that I haven’t posted is that every time I thought I could set up a quick post, I ran smack up against the Word Press Block Editor. It frustrated me, angered me even. I tried all the tips from various bloggers who have found a way around it – but my screens didn’t match theirs and I couldn’t click on the buttons they said to.
Now I’ve determined that if Block Editor had been what there was when I started posting, I would have learned it. So I’ll learn it now. Please bear with me and forgive my mistakes over the next few weeks.
P.S. Some of the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.
On a cloudy afternoon, following a morning of drizzle, I can still see some autumn colour. It’s amazing that, after the winds of Hurricane Dorian, the remnants of Tropical Storm Melissa, and the mini-tropical depression that pelted us with heavy rain and high winds yesterday, so many of the trees are still holding onto their leaves.
It’s been a gorgeous fall here on the North Shore of Nova Scotia. And today, despite the rain and cloud, was another beautiful day: sweater-mild and glowing.
You might notice some differences in the landscape since, say September three years ago. We’ve chopped down that scraggly pear tree in the foreground, trimmed up the alder in the “rock” garden, and the spruce tree has grown up past the power lines again. But the biggest change is a result of Hurricane Dorian in late August. We lost the hard maple tree at the very end of the driveway, and half of one of the tamaracks. Friends helped us clean it up the very next day.
We also lost a pine tree at the parking end of the drive, a small willow by the barn and what amounted to a large limb (in bits and pieces) from the big poplar tree by the house. We (and the house) came through unscathed.
I hope you enjoy this little piece of nature. I’m not looking forward to the winter but, oh my, I do love the fall!
The last day of November was beautiful with our first major snow, heavy & fluffy and clinging to to branches. December 1st was a bleak, chill day with a rain-like snow that the photo didn’t capture.
The Weather Network was telling me it was 3C (37F) with no precipitation but it was snowing, I tell you!
I was wrong about all the leaves being gone by now. On sunny days (becoming fewer after a beautiful October), there’s still some gold in them thar hills.
I expect to see a drastic difference–and little evidence of life–by the end of the month.
Last week when I made the trip to town I saw only a branch or two turned colour. This week, entire hillsides are red and gold. The trees I see from my window are late performers, I guess, although the green they’re wearing is looking mighty tired. Even the sky looks washed out.
The afternoon shadows are so long so early!
By the first of November, I expect the leaves to be gone, so you’ll likely miss the colour show.
Time for the monthly update on the view from my office window.
The past three weeks have been sunny and hot, as many other places have been. It was beginning to look as if we would have a “mini-drought” but yesterday the clouds moved in:
And then it rained – one of those beautiful summer rains that come straight down so that you can keep all the windows open and hear it drip from the eaves, and smell that wonderful warm-earth-meets-rain smell called (very unromantically)petrichor.
It rained gently into the night. Today promises to be sunny and hot again – perfect for the beach!
Time for the monthly update on the view from my office window.
In the photo, there doesn’t seem to have been much change since the beginning of June. But when you’re here, you can tell that the wild roses in the circle garden are blooming, and everything is just fuller.
The weather in June was crummy for the first two weeks: cold and rainy. The rain pushed back the fence-building work which, in turn, pushed back the tree trimming. That pear tree in the foreground has got to go!
It’s been lovely since and all the rain and then the sun has made everything lush. This long holiday weekend promises to be sunny and hot – perfect beach weather.
In April I decided to post a view from my office window on the last Friday afternoon of each month.
I was half-way across the continent last Friday afternoon (the last one in May) so I’m posting a photo from today. I didn’t want you to miss seeing the “May Effect”.
Nova Scotia came alive over the past month!
It’s still too cold for the beach (9C/48F now, at 10am, and the forecasted high for today is 15C/59C) but it’s gorgeous for yard work (like pruning that pear tree). And the lilacs are just beginning to open!
A few years ago, I ran a series of pictures with the view from my office window every Friday afternoon. I stopped because I thought there wasn’t enough change week to week to bear recording.
What I’ve decided to do now is to post a picture from the last Friday afternoon of each month.
We’ve had a milder winter than a lot of places but April has been cold and spring is still slow to come. I maintain that it’s only the first three weeks of May that are spring in Nova Scotia, anyway.
I’ll be in Ontario for a couple of weeks in May, so I’ll miss a lot of it. Buy–hey!–it’ll be summer when I come home!
And what a difference a day makes: this was yesterday.
A year or so ago, I ran a series of pictures with the view from my office window every Friday afternoon. I stopped because I thought there wasn’t enough change week to week to bear recording.
What I’ve decided to do now is to post a picture from the last Friday afternoon of each month. Since tomorrow I have a Giveaway Hop post scheduled, I decided to start for April with this Thursday view.
It’s April in Nova Scotia. We’ve had a milder winter than a lot of places but spring is still slow to come. The tree in the right foreground is a pear. No buds. The trees at the end of the driveway are tamaracks. No buds. There’s a birch tree across the driveway. No buds.
But just you wait. May is coming – and May’s the month that summer comes to Nova Scotia. Be sure to check in for the May 31st photo!
I’m sitting here by my office window drinking in the smells and sounds of the first rain in several weeks.
I remember learning the word petrichor several years ago. It’s said to be the only English noun that means a specific scent: that distinctively pleasant fragrance of rain falling on dry ground after a long, dry spell. This gorgeous word was coined by two Australian geologists, I. J. Bear and R. G. Thomas, in a 1964 article that appeared in the journal Nature.
Our late winter storm: I don’t think there’s quite the 15 cm (6 in) they forecast, but there’s sure the ice pellets mixed with it, as they warned.
The bright side is, it’s been too cold (expected of this season) for many buds to have appeared so nothing’s been ruined by last night’s weather activity.
This is my first time participating in the Saturday Snapshot meme, hosted by Alyce of At Home With Books. Visit her blog to see more great photos or add your own.
We woke up this morning to a winter wonderland. The whole world seemed silent and clean. The tree house isn’t quite finished (and not quite in a tree anymore since a storm took it down).
But for a few glorious minutes just before noon, the sun burst out from the clouds at the back of the house and made everything glow. You can see the shadow of the roof peak in the bottom right.
I’m so glad I captured this moment – have a wonderful weekend!
I know I’m a day late but I do have an explanation.
Heavy rain started here in Nova Scotia about midnight Thursday and continued on until supper time Friday. In all, about 56 mm (just over 2 inches) came down in that time period. I took this photo Friday morning from my office window, thinking that the rain was benefiting the view: making the sere colours of November deepen and glow.
We had a dinner reservation with some friends in Halifax (about a two hour drive) and were amazed to see the water on the way: ditches running white water rapids, streams flowing through fields and down hillsides where there had been no streams a day earlier, standing water making hay fields resemble rice paddies, but the roads were fine even through Truro which sits on a flood plain at the end of the Bay of Fundy (highest tides in the world!)
Truro is located at the far right end of the water in this diagram (just off the map) – past where it says tides are 49 feet (15 m).
Ah – but supper time was low tide. By the time we traveled home at 10 that evening, matters were different. We saw a car abandoned in the Sobey’s parking lot, water up to the middle of its doors. And we found all the access roads through & around Truro closed because of flooding, necessitating some quick thinking and back roads to get home.
None of my photos turned out because it was too dark – but trust me: what looks so benign in my front yard was anything but at high tide in Truro.
Summer is fast drawing to a close & I realize that I’ve not shown you a full summer view from my window. (Oh, I wish I had a new camera!)
Despite the warmish weather of the last couple of weeks, the grasses and trees are losing their vibrant summer green, so I thought I’d concentrate on the mountain ash tree in the front garden. It volunteered itself there about four years ago and this year, for the first time, displayed the glossy orange berries that characterize it. (And, yes, the sky is really is that blue.)
We spent yesterday afternoon at the beach but it rained all night and today it’s 13C/55F with a NW wind blowing at 60km/35mph that makes it feel much colder. But the sun is shining – which it’s supposed to do all weekend. Have a good one, wherever you are. I’ll be back with book-related posts next week.
