For no discernible reason, I am in a gardening slump. Seed catalogs and the most recent issues of  Gardens Illustrated and The English Garden remain unopened and un-highlighted on my desk, The seed packets from Chiltern’s in the UK I was so excited about  remain in the elastic bands that bound them upon arrival.   I have yet to go out to cut any branches to force, I have bought no new bulbs to start for indoor winter bloom haven’t even cracked open the  two new garden books i received for Christmas ( Highgrove ; An English Country Garden and   The Art of Gardening: Design Inspiration and Innovative Planting Techniques from Chanticleer ). . The garden seems a distant a foreign entity I neither dream about nor visit. It is , in a word, weird.

Yet I know I must work my way out f it, and SOON! I have to start getting programs ready for next year, have to pick my Open Days( including one for the Massachusetts Master Gardeners) and must update parts of this website . I never know what force in the universe will drive me out of a slump, one day , out of nowhere will come the creative energy to get going again and then I will probably be annoyingly over-productive and obsessed . Until then , though, i will be happily knitting and doing some much needed work indoors ( you know, the kind that we all abandon when the siren of the garden calls ) .

if you are local please check out the info on the upcoming Home Hort Series at Tower Hill Botanic Garden in the spring. I teach two of the classes, Perennial Culture and Nomenclature, and would love to see a full house for both. I will also be teaching two classes, one on Clematis and one on Hydrangeas for the Northeast at the Western Massachusets Master Gardener Lower Valley Symposium on April 2, 2016, . You can also save the date for the upcoming Mass Master Gardener FIRST annual symposium on October 1,2016 at Westford Academy in Westford, Ma. Our line-up of speakers is fantastic and the committee putting the event together is top notch , so it should be a fun and informative day!

I truly hope you are all snuggled warmly up somewhere, enjoying your time off from the garden!

ps if you want to see any of my winter photos, I post many on my FB and Instagram pages..check them out !

garden in the burrow on instagram  and  Facebook 

this flock of birds hung around here for days