Piles and piles of fresh snow in the garden today.

I keep taking photos of Viburnum buds almost every year, and it never gets old. I love the contrast between the vibrant pink and green of the buds and the stark white of the snow, and the tender softness of one and the sharp coldness of the other.



It’s also fascinating to see just how much snow can clump up and be supported on almost nothing. That seed head is almost all air, just a few thready, wispy stalks. If I tried to put things there and make them balance, I’d probably break the stalks and drop everything. But when fluff gets to settle there naturally, it works.

–17°C for the 2nd morning in a row. Bloody freezing. Indoors some bits are down to +17°C which isn’t quite bloody freezing but just a bit chillier than I would prefer. But yr.no promises above-zero temperatures already tomorrow so it’s not worth adjusting any of the thermostats. I’ll just pull a blanket over my shoulders in the evening.

The cold water pipe to the shower seems to have frozen. All the other taps work fine, but the shower only gives me hot water. Should have turned on the heating coils but didn’t think of it in time. So got to wash myself and my hair the old-fashioned way this morning, with a tub and a scoop. It brought back memories of all the saunas I’ve been to during my ski tours in the north of Sweden.

Bonus side effect of the cold snap: light pillars at night, several days in a row.

Birchleaf spirea in autumn colours.

I have ignored everything in the garden this season to the point where I really feel guilty about it. But not guilty enough to counterbalance the total lack of energy and desire to do anything about it, most of the time. Except today I actually cleaned out the weeds from the strawberry planters. Next year we might actually get some berries.

I finally have a plum tree! I’ve been looking for one for a year already, but the kind I wanted has been sold out everywhere.

Here, finally, is a Reine Claude d’Oullins on a dwarf Pixy stock. Now – fingers crossed – I hope I can keep it alive.

Cyclamens are like magic.

I give up on watering them during summer. Even in winter they are thirsty things, needing near-daily watering. In the hot sun and the dry air of the summer, it’s hopeless to try and keep them watered and alive. So they wither down to dead-looking lumps.

And then suddenly they decide that the world is now in a liveable state again and send out new shoots. That’s when I bring them back to the kitchen from their exile on the living room’s shadiest windowsill, and start watering them again.

I love the pre-autumn colours on this hydrangea. The sharp blue blossoms have softened into a pale violet; the leaves have that lovely blend of russet and green.

The cucumber plant we’re plant-sitting has produced exactly one crooked, fist-sized cucumber.

The cherry harvest this year is really poor. Half the tree has borne no fruit at all, and that’s the south-facing side which is usually heavily laden with fruit. The north-facing side had some at least, but many have gone bad and fallen to the ground before even being fully ripe.

This is our drawer of boxes. This sounds much better in Swedish because a drawer is låda and a box is also låda so the whole thing is a lådlåda.

It’s funny how some concepts are narrow in one language and broad in another, and vice versa.

A “bag” in English (and a kott in Estonian) can in Swedish be kasse, väska or påse, and those three are definitely not interchangeable. A påse is a bag for storage or containment (like a freezer bag or a drawstring bag); a kasse is a simple soft bag you carry something in (like a shopping bag); a väska is structured (like a handbag or backpack). Despite being 100% fluent in Swedish, it isn’t rare for Ingrid and Adrian to mix those up, and I suspect it’s because they grew up with me always calling all three things “kott” when talking to them.

See also: maa in Finnish and the same in video format.