Seasonal Notes - January

January, 2024

The new year started as the old one finished: rain, rain and more rain! I can safely say that it’s been raining here practically non-stop for 11 months. A brief respite in June but I managed to go abroad - and find more rain while the sun shone back home! Story of my life…

While all gardeners welcome rain, you can have too much of a good thing! And when you garden at altitude as I do, it just adds to the already frustrating issue of an all-too-short growing season. Soggy, cold soil makes sowing and planting problematic as roots rot and slugs and snails have a feast on new seedlings - if the seeds sown haven’t already rotted in the ground, that is! Of course you can start things off in the greenhouse, potting shed or window sill, but at some point they have to go outside and brave the elements - and up here they are very harsh. 

One of the first rules of successful gardening is to choose plants appropriate to your climate and micro-climate. There is no point planting a banana plant up here, that’s for sure! But then I never would anyway. My mantra is that all the plants I choose for the garden should be able to thrive in their conditions and not look out of place. Tropical plants in the Peak District just don’t look right! The closest I get to anything exotic is lavender. Despite the wet (which lavenders HATE), they have just about survived where I have planted them, close to the house in shallow, well-drained soil, and mixed in with structural box and free-form naturalised foxgloves, cosmos and the like, they look delightful and flower well and certainly don’t look out of place in the slightly more formal terracing close to the house. 

But I digress. January 2024 did very little to entice me out into the garden. In fact the dreadful weather of the last 11 months has meant that I have spent far less time in the garden than I normally would, which is such a shame. I just haven’t felt inclined to go out in lashing rain and high winds. 

One of the things I most looked forward to when we moved here 21 years ago was the winter garden: in those days snow in winter was a given. Frosty mornings were a given. In short, everything I love and adore about winter. I would go out and take endless photos of frost-fringed leaves on the lawn, icicles hanging from the gutters and bare branches etched against sharp blue skies. Utterly delightful. Sadly, in recent times, such days and events are increasingly rare. I think we have had just one or two days like that this winter so far and in my bones I know there will be very few more. We are now experiencing up here the sort of weather I ran away from down in London two decades ago - just endless dull, grey days whether spring, summer, autumn or winter. I headed north all those years ago excited by a return to seasonal delights. Sadly it seems that climate change is putting an end to all that. As the south gets warmer and drier, the northwest gets even wetter than it was before - but not cold enough now to allow the humidity to fall as snow in winter. 

And so I took a few desultory walks around the garden in brief pauses between downpours and noted the first snowdrops coming into flower, the lawn carpeted in twigs and branches from all the storms, the abundant soft green moss on the walls, the overflowing stream, the piles of wet leaves in the borders and a general sense of lassitude. There is a sense even the plants, trees and shrubs are fed up. I yearn for sharp, crisp, cold days; for the crunch of icy puddles on my walks rather than slipping in endless mud; for energising, ionic air rather than the creeping damp chill which makes my bones ache (even the dog is suffering). 

However, I will leave you with a few images of the few days in January when we did actually have a little dusting of snow and some of those crisp, bright winter days which are such a joy to behold and which must be grasped as rare jewels in the increasingly less sparkling crown of mid winter…