Last night it snowed for real. It was forecast to hit the eastern counties after dark, and when I finally summoned the energy to get out of my warm bed this morning I didn't even wait to find out the awful truth until I got to the view down the garden from bathroom window, but peered through the bedroom curtains into the wood. Snow. Horrible, lumpen, cold, obstructive, destructive, snow.
The point at which I stopped loving snow must have been one of the moments that I became, at least in some ways, middle aged. When I was a child I loved snow, and desperately hoped it would last until I could get home from school, but then I wasn't a gardener. Middle age is a matter of attitude as much as years. We must all have met people, still young in chronological terms, as cautious, censorious and set in their ways as if they were already within sniffing distance of collecting their pensions, and we can probably think of others in receipt of their free bus passes whose spontaneous enthusiasm for life seems undimmed by years. Likewise middle age is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. My inner five year old is in many respects alive and well. Just not when it comes to snow. Or at least, snow on my garden and in my lane and disrupting my trains.
Snow is a destructive force in a garden. It bends shrubs out of shape, sometimes never to recover, and tears branches off trees, leaving ugly, rot-prone gashes in the trunk. It clings wetly to evergreen leaves, and seems to have a particularly bad effect on some of the southern hemisphere shrubs like Pittosporum. It may act as an insulating blanket for those plants that are adapted to harsh winters, but it kills and maims many that aren't. Reading reports of the frozen shoreline at Sandbanks, and the metre of snowfall in northern Italy, I imagine the damage done in my own garden being multiplied in other gardens around Europe, gardens much finer and lovelier than mine, and I detest the snow.
The book I've been reading, confined in the house by the snow and the cold, is Romantic Moderns by Alexandra Harris. The subtitle is 'English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper', which is a bit of a mouthful. It is a good book, and I'll probably return to the subject when I've finished it. One of the questions that exercised artists in the early part of the last century was whether the visual arts should carry any associations with actual objects and places at all, or whether art should be a purely aesthetic experience, stripped of meaning. I find it impossible to extract a purely visual response to the snow in my garden. I can't strip the snowfall of its meaning. It is causing damage. It is harming my plants. The fact that it is white, and changes the shapes of things, and makes the ordinary look different and puzzling, gives no pleasure, even though I can see that's what it's doing. In a different context it might look beautiful, and as it happens one of my favourite photographs in last year's exhibition of the Hungarian photographers at the RA was of a scene in a snowy park, with trees, curving railings, seats and figures all outlined against the white blankness of snow. But that was in another country.
Even allowing for my unenthusiastic eye, this snow has not looked like a classic scene of snowy beauty. Because it has not been that cold (hurrah!) the branches of the trees are not sparkling and studded with hoar frost, and the blanket of white is mostly confined to ground level, apart from making Eyeores out of any evergreens. 10cm of snow is not enough to give complete cover, and the fields in the middle distance are speckled with brown rather than being a sea of gleaming white. And nothing much has gleamed at all, because it's been a dull, overcast day, not good for viewing.
The snow tells its own stories. A set of footprints this morning, their bases already partly filled with more snow showing the prints were made in the night while the snow was still falling, went past the end of the house and up to the door of the hen house, where they turned around in a sharp V and went around the back of the chicken house to the corner where the netting of the run meets the side of the shed, then away across the herb bed. I should say that was the fox, coming by to check that the hens really were locked in. No messing around, just an efficient inspection of potential weak points.
The Systems Administrator went out on foot to check the state of the roads, and reported that someone had put a snowplough along the lane, which is an improvement on last winter. I should think the local farmers have taken it in hand. Getting out by car should be do-able with care, when we need to. Until then I'm staying indoors. My inner five year old is one thing, but my outer almost fifty year old has a stinking chest cold and a life-long tendency to rheumatism if it gets chilled or damp.
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