by James Alexander-Sinclair
The ground is too hard and the east wind too ticklish for relaxed gardening, but there is still great pleasure to be had from looking at and photographing gardens.
Happy New Year. I hope your Christmases involved many good things and that you're not feeling too lethargic and doughy. January is, it must be admitted, a pretty dreadful month but we should ignore the doom and gloom and look for silver linings.
It has, as I'm sure you've noticed, been a bit cold over Christmas — like a proper winter. The ground is too hard and the east wind too ticklish for relaxed gardening, but there is still great pleasure to be had from looking at and photographing gardens. Many people will have received digital cameras from Santa and will soon discover how unbelievably useful they can be. See a plant you like in a friend's garden? Click. See a spectacular border? Click. Notice a great combination at a flower show? Click. Catch Joe Swift doing something embarrassing? Click. Never again will you be stuck for a plant name: if you have a photograph you can always look it up.
Some of the most spectacular pictures can be taken when it is frosty or snowy. The general dreariness of January can be transformed by a smattering of frost and a blue sky. Whether you're capturing wide landscapes or close-up details it's a great time to take a spectacular photograph. Evergreens such as yew are good subjects, but so are less obvious candidates like beech, grasses, roses or even completely random objects.
The digital camera also comes in handy when keeping a garden diary. I have pictures of my garden spanning the depths of winter to highest summer so I can always see which bits work and which bits are best forgotten. Sometimes I notice a gap or mistake in a planting scheme. I then tend to completely forget where it was by the time the autumn comes and it's a good time for moving things around. With a photograph you can easily remember what is going on.
Snow is forecast so the Kodak moments are only going to get better.
So even if you can't do much gardening at this time of year, at least get out there and take some photographs. In the words of Telly Savalas in his extraordinarily cheesy 1975 hit: "If a picture paints a thousand words…"
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