White out

The front steps, today.

I rearranged the terrace a bit yesterday, little expecting today's snow. Nothing major, just swiveling the stone table, swapping some pots around, thinking by moving. I want a bigger table and am wondering just how big a stone slab I can find. The current one, a fieldstone gift from a friend, years ago, is three feet long by about two wide. It can squeeze four, but I'd like a comfortable six, for those spring and summer dinners whose thought pulls me through winter.

I cut roses back, finding some disease in the canes, and may take up the kind offer of a couple more bare root roses from David Austen. Then again, these roses are tough and tend to survive. Also, I'm not allowed to order anymore plants online; I think I need an alarm on my laptop. Bwaap, bwaap, bwaap! Back away from the computer!

Quite apart from the annual climbing beans, the Nicotiana and the last-minute favas I ordered, I now expect for my horticultural melting pot terrace: 10 Lilium longiflorum (Asian species lilies, white, trumpet-shaped), 3 Lilium canadense (native to the Northeast), 6 Gloriosa superbum (southern Africa), and 10 Uvullaria grandiflora (a woodland wildflower native to the Northeast) - I hope the latter do well. I've never grown them before. They're summer-dormant so perhaps I'll plant them with Begonia grandis (hardy begonia), if I can find any, or ever-blooming Dicentra eximia, another native.

But for now, the snow falls thick, wet and fast.