While we are still above average in snowfall this winter, it has been unusually warm as well. January averaged over 7 degrees above normal. That’s hugely ridiculous in terms of warm (although much of that had to do with warm evenings. Very much of our warming here in New England has to do with nights not getting as cold as they should. In January, the nights were as warm as the days!)

So unfortunately when we have precipitation, what’s falling is falling as rain (if we’re lucky) or freezing rain if we’re not. Either way, there hasn’t been much significant snow since early December.

What then do we see during all this rain and ice?

I am lucky. I have a lot of moss. So there is a significant amount of green around my property.

Of course many of us plant evergreens so that we have something to look at in the winter as well.

The above house, with the betula nigra and the evergreens, is especially nice. It’s a great landscape for a non-snowy winter. There’s lots of color and winter interest.

Here’s a better look at just the evergreens from that same landscape.

For my long time readers, if you remember the gingko tree from last fall, with the pool of golden leaves all over the ground–this is that same landscape. It’s really first class.

And the structure of bare branches is sometimes more beautiful than trees with leaves.

But otherwise, a winter landscape with no snow is sort of dead and brown. As a gardener, it just seems to be resting, waiting for spring.

I talk all the time about how I garden in the “frozen north.” This year, it has alternated between being frozen and being something else. We have had stretches of milder days (40s and 50s when it should have been in the 30s) and then downright unreasonably warm days in the upper 60s and low 70s.

By the time this is posted, we should be back to something approximating “normal” for us or even below normal–20s or low 30s and blustery winds. That’s certainly not the sort of weather that makes one say, “Gosh, I want to get outside and do some gardening!”

But on the warmer days, there are things that can be done if the ground underneath is still frozen and you don’t risk compacting wet soil by walking on it.

First, you can prune small dormant trees. Any large-scale pruning is best left to the arborists of course. But removing dead twigs from a Japanese maple, for example, is a great thing to do, and will stimulate growth in the spring.

It’s easy to tell the dead from the living twigs. The dead twigs are usually ashy gray while the living twigs are “tree colored” for lack of a better description. On my red Japanese maples, they are reddish and on my green Japanese maples, they are greenish.

With small hand pruners, remove the dead twigs neatly back to the living branch. It’s that simple.

Other easy chores are to just walk around and collect small branches that have accumulated (already) during the windy days. You can stack them somewhere for a small animal burrow, or tie them into bundles for your town to remove, if your town does that.

Or you can take a walk and enjoy the lovely weather and get ideas from other people’s gardens, when you can see the structure more clearly.

Or you can just enjoy taking a walk, without spring pollen (if that irritates you!)

While winter warmth can be troubling, it’s also a gift and a blessing in many ways. I always try to use those warm days to my advantage–there are never enough of them!

If you have been following this blog for a while, you know that I am quite the believer in using squirrels nests to predict the severity of the winter.

This may sound silly or strange to some, but it’s just a different version of those old farmer’s tales. This is how it works.

Supposedly the higher up in a tree a squirrel builds its nest, the colder the winter will be. You have to know, of course, that squirrels always build at least halfway up the tree or higher–so it helps to know a little bit about squirrels to start.

So a nest at about the mid-point of the tree–or even slightly higher–would mean a very mild winter.

Conversely, a nest very near the top means a cold winter.

I will weigh in here with the objective observation that I have never completely understood why this is true. It would seem to me that if I were a gray furry mammal and I thought it was going to be cold, I would like to be nearer to the ground than way up in the air.

But my nearly decade long survey of squirrels and their nesting habits has shown that they seem to know what the heck they are doing. It just proves that I would never survive in the wild!

So based on past predictions, my squirrels are calling for the polar vortex. Don’t say they didn’t warn you!