winter flowers

Now that it's cold and snowy and dark outside, I am cheered by the amazing flowers that are blooming in the house.

The Christmas cactus is dormant all summer, and bursts into bloom when the days are at their shortest.  It will go on to bloom about four times during the dull days of winter before it goes back to sleep in Spring.

I have never seen the flowers produced by a Wandering Jew until this year.  Yellow tassels are replaced by white fluff that doesn't get a chance to blow away in a windless house.

My red oxalis looks like a perfect shamrock.  And the purple nodding trumpets look great all summer blooming outside, and continue blooming in the house, if they get enough light.

"Lemon tree very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet....."  I am definitely letting you know my age when I say I remember that old song by Trini Lopez from the '60s.  But the lemon flower does smell amazingly sweet, and my small tree is full of them.

This spider plant baby will soon be putting out a white flower.

The amaryllis, just popping a shoot out of the bulb at the moment, promises a thick stalk with three to four big trumpet-shaped pink flowers.

snow birds

We had our first real dump of snow, and the birds are ready to  take all the help I'm willing to give. So I loaded up the bird feeder with black oil sunflower seeds, and set some peanuts on the railing.  I stood outside in the bitter cold with my camera, knowing that shooting without a glass barrier will give me a much better result.
Not to minimize the regular visitors, the chickadees and bluejays, I get very excited when I see something else.  The other day there was a lovely downy woodpecker getting seeds.  But today, I couldn't believe my eyes.  A massive Northern Flicker was pigging out at the feeder!  This is the biggest woodpecker in North America.  I usually see them in spring, hopping around the lawn looking for worms, acting very much like anything but a woodpecker.  This guy today would eat a seed, and then flick great quantities of seeds everywhere.  Now I know why he's called a flicker!  If he wasn't such a handsome devil, I would have flicked him away from the feeder when I first noticed such bad behavior.

I caught this guy with a peanut.

Chickadees are curious and not afraid to come close.

first snow

It snowed yesterday, and it continued all night.  Not the stuff that looks like styrofoam pellets and melts right away, but icy, hard stuff that stuck around all day.  November 10 is very early for this nonsense, but it has a certain beauty as well.

Snow crystals have covered each blade of grass separately.  The textured effect looks like a cocoanut cookie.  For me, it's always about food!

We went for a walk in the National Park and I cut some branches of winter berry.  They make a beautiful, long-lasting display in the house.  The berries are bigger and more plentiful than usual this year.

It's almost time to ditch the pumpkins.  The jack-o-lantern has a certain frosty charm.

Snow covers every branch of the burning bush, but the colours shine through.

There's no snow on these wild rose hips.  But I love these saturated colours.