Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about willows, snowdrops, and me. You may remember me from such posts as “The Dog Star”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This is me investigating something. I forget what it was. Maybe I saw a mouse; we have a lot of those in the garden.

Here I am again under the purple-leaved Prunus andersonii, looking at something again.
So tomorrow we have another “fire weather” warning.
The last few times we had wind it did dry out a lot of stuff, and the guy I live with says using a lot of native warm-season grasses can make the garden look pretty dry at this time of year, but he also pointed out that we had half again as much water from snow as the average precipitation for last month; on my evening walk he scratched the surface of the canal road and said it was damp an inch down.

This past December was the second-warmest in recorded history, which doesn’t really go back all that far. It’s not unusual to have temperatures of 64F (17.7C) at this time of year, but so many in a row is weird, and the fact that it’s only snowed three times is even weirder. He says “they” say we might get some snow at the end of next week.

The snowdrops certainly haven’t minded the warm temperatures.
The ones in the shade garden are flowering, though there are many more to come. The “header” shows how they’ll look in a few weeks.
These are some he dug up from the path in the shade garden; he said he needs to dig up more, because he keeps stepping on them.
These are extremely vigorous snowdrops and even though they don’t have a name maybe he likes these better because they grow like crazy.
This is Galanthus plicatus subsp. byzantinus again.
Plicatus because you can see that the outer edges of the leaves are folded inwards (the guy I live with said it should really be “explicatus” to make it clearer); byzantinus because it grows near Istanbul (ancient Byzantium).
These would normally be flowering at this time of year anyway, even with a little snow on the ground.

And those are the snowdrops. Now I’m going to post three pictures of the willow at the end of the path that the guy I live with took over the last two weeks or so. Two were posted on Facebook but the last one wasn’t.
There’s a streetlight off to the right that illuminates the green belt, but in different ways, as you can see.
This is the same species of willow I saw on my walk in the park, but the guy I live with says this one is especially photogenic.

That’s all I have for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me under the arbor.

Until next time, then.