}

Wednesday, August 01, 2018

Entering the last of winter


Today is the first of August, and that means the end of winter is drawing closer. Technically, the first day of Spring is one month away, on September 1, but the weather will be all over the show for the next few months. It always goes that way.

The photo above shows me in front of our camellia bush, which, as I said in the caption, has abundant blooms this year. It was pretty last year, but it also was nothing like this year. I don’t know enough about camellias to have any idea what, specifically, it liked about the past year to make it bloom so much this year, so I have no idea whether there’s anything I can do to make it happen next year.

The main downside of having such a full blooming this year is in the photo below: Lots of spent blooms falling onto the ground. I should rake it all up, but, obviously, I haven’t. They’ll be chopped up when the lawns are mowed, which will probably be Friday, so I have no real incentive to rake them up right now.

The temperatures have been cold at night lately, but we haven’t had any rain for the past three days (!), and today was actually kind of mild, relatively speaking. That’s something we should see: Less rain, more sun, but with both cold and warm days.

The one thing we will see is the daily increasing amount of daylight time. I noticed today at 5pm that I could still see the last shafts of sunshine outside, and twilight was considerably after that. Not many weeks ago, it was dark by four-something in the afternoon. Although, for now, we may not see the lengthening days on some days because of the inevitable cloudy days.

Still, it was nice to have a little break from the worst of winter over the past few days, and we know that spring will come—sooner or later. It always goes that way.

Camellia debris.

2 comments:

rogerogreen said...

THAT'S winter? HA!

Arthur Schenck (AmeriNZ) said...

I know!! And every winter I'm so glad for that. But it turns out it IS possible to get sick of even a mild, relatively speaking, winter.