Frozen land, garden reset

When nature tells us to shut down it's wise to listen

Jan 10, 2025

Our top small meadow at -9C in the Pennine Hills

Yesterday I had to force myself back inside, tear myself away from the beauty of snow and ice to head back to the real world and do some work. When your heart and mind opens to the natural world, it is easy to become lost in it forever.

We’re coming up to a week of snow, turning our world monochrome overnight, a silencing mesmeric wonder. As I type this to you this morning, warming my hands on a coffee and a follow up Earl Grey tea, we’ve faced the second night of cold, reaching -9C for us at our elevated position of almost 1,000ft just below the peat moor.

This kind of freeze is a moment of reset for gardens across the country, plants know how cold it is. Hardy plants deploy a range of measures to cope, from urgently reducing the amount of liquid in their cells to prevent their cell walls exploding in the freeze, others have a built in anti-freeze. Many sacrifice the above ground parts to retreat beneath the earth.

Plantlife is smarter than given credit, it simply operates in a different way to us, using chemicals to sense the world, living on an alternative time scale. At one time slower, and yet perfectly in sync with the seasons at the same speed as us.

Everything has to stop in the garden, a pause for my mind

Ignoring the news with its perpetual fearmongering, I’ve avoided the madness of icy roads, staying close to home enjoying this rare natural moment. Given how people get on with this much snow up north, it makes us laugh how London grinds to a halt with a tiny dusting. My thoughts have slowed down to focus on an exciting new design project I’ve begun, and admiring the silhouettes of trees in and around the garden.

Most of our perennials have been flattened, as happens every year here, so I won’t need to do much cutting back in spring. Though the Panicum grasses remain stubbornly vertical, protecting insect life within. I know when the snow melts, like magic it will leave behind a mass of snowdrops. They’re continuing to grow right now under the protective icy blanket as we head toward January’s full moon toward the end of the month.

All of the water tanks I failed to empty are frozen solid. I pour a kettle of boiling water daily into our chickens’ water bowl, turning the solid block of ice into drinkable water for the daytime. Chickens are surprisingly hardy with insulating feathers, though we make sure they’re tucked away at night in their coop.

I keep trying to go through our wonky garden gate forgetting it’s frozen solid

This year, I haven’t been focussed on new plants for our main wildlife garden because I’m excited about the many plants I’ve been stocking up on over the last four years. Oh, except, I’m reminded by the freeze, we do need a hardier scarlet flowered alternative to Penstemon ‘Andenken an Friedrich Hahn’. The remaining plant won’t survive this.

About to head into our fifth growing season I feel a reset within me, this freeze has come at the right time for it. Hard to believe so much time has passed since we moved to this remote spot. I’m now ready to make our garden feel fuller, not least because the plants I’ve been growing will be large enough to have the impact needed.

It’s not that I’m not ordering more seeds and plants, I am, but for our allotment and food production. We’ve had lots of success with food here, but last year wasn’t great due to the wet cold spring and I want to make sure that was a one off. So I’ve been researching and ordering vegetables, I’ll share in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, we venture out, careful not to slip on the ice. Around the area, it’s easiest right now to admire the shapes and structures of wild downy birch and sessile oak.

I’ll leave you with a few more photos from this past week. I thought it was useful to show you how cold it gets for us here, because then you’ll know everything we grow can survive these conditions.