A Snowy New Year

What lurks underneath that freshly fallen snow?

It seems like this whole half of the country has been inundated with snow storms. My garden’s under a few inches of snow and as I type this it’s just starting to snow again. I look out at the yard and it seems that the garden has come to a standstill. It’s frozen in time.

A few weeks back I read The Milkweed Lands by Eric Lee-Mader. The book is a beautifully illustrated, thorough introduction to milkweed and its lifecycle.

In his chapter Prairie Winter, Eric writes about the invisible-to-us activity happening around the milkweed. The white-footed mouse uses milkweed floss to insulate the nest it builds in the crook of a shrub. Meadow voles travel through their snow-covered corridors and snack on the plant. Eric explains:

I discovered this on my own farm in Washington State, when nearly a hundred showy milkweed rhizomes that I planted went missing one winter. Walking in the tall meadow, I found a food cache that included a few of my rhizomes, along with other wild roots and seeds.

I love this illustration by Beverly Duncan that shows the vole highways amongst the plants:

I know that even though our backyard looks like a static, snowy landscape there must be tons of activity happening just out of sight or, perhaps, on a much smaller scale than what I’m capable of noticing. I walked into our backyard to look for signs of life and, initially, I just saw our dog Kip’s footprints in the snow.

I walked up to a suet feeder I put up last week and crouched down to look closer at some markings on the ground.

Tiny bird footprints criss cross the area. Perhaps they belong to the song sparrows that I sometimes spot hopping around that corner of the garden. And below the snow cover, there’s even more life. I can’t see it for myself but in his book Eric writes of queen bumblebees, beetles, nematodes and springtails (whose bodies produce a sort of antifreeze that allows them to be active in winter) lurking/squirming a few inches underground.

I just checked the weekly forecast and there’s no thaw in sight yet. I’ll keep taking short walks around the yard and looking for signs of life. Even if I don’t see any, I know that somewhere under this snow there are a few dozen snowdrops starting to think about emerging.

How’s your garden looking this week? Seen any interesting signs of llife under your snowfall? I’d love to hear about it.

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And one more thing: I just bought this on eBay:

It’s a fascinating reference book from 1979 that has entries on hundreds of different plants. For each plant it lists, in chronological order, how humans have used it throughout history. For example, dove’s foot geranium was used to treat “greene and bleeding wounds” in the 1600s, it was considered “good in looseness for bowels and diarrhea” in the 1800s and by the 1900s it was a treatment “for healing a sore mouth.”

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