Of all of our snow falls so far this winter, this one was by far the prettiest, the easiest to walk through (although it’s still a bootdeep trudge), and the most personally rewarding. My walk around Blithewold this morning was perfectly timed to catch the just-come-out sun catching the heavy glaze on the trees, and to remember why I love winter at the very same moment I was reminded that spring is coming up next.

I always think of robins as being a harbinger of spring but evidently they’re here the whole time. Why don’t we see them more often? (Or am I just not paying attention?) Today a good-sized flock of robins and cedar waxwings were working on the privet and crab apples, so intent on filling their bellies they hardly bothered to scatter when I came along.

Do you see robins year-round? Which berries are being eaten in your garden right now?

Along with taking a good look back at last year’s successes and failures (I’ll get to those later maybe) we gardeners take this time to look forward and dream a little. (Incidentally, we are probably at our most optimistic right now: in January – the “dead of winter.”  Just before another storm pig-piles more snow on the garden.) Gail and I have been gathering our thoughts before we open the catalogs, and started to volley some ideas for next years gardens back and forth across the table. (This might well be the very best part of our job.)

We have both come to realize that we’re not interested in gardening just for our own or our (human) visitors’ pleasure. I haven’t forgotten that is a public garden – stick with me here: we have just started noticing that we habitually use words like “nature”, “habitat”, “environment”, and “ecosystem” and of course you already know that we are head over heels for pollinators. In truth, welcoming pollinators, insects and birds into the garden is ultimately self-serving because wildlife is good for the garden and what’s good for the garden is great for its visitors – as well as its gardeners.

So this year we’re considering buying or making bird, bat, butterfly, toad, and mason bee houses and as usual, we’ll be planting a lot of flowers. We’ll also make some changes to our maintenance practices to allow more seed heads to remain. All of these intentions will be part of how we form our designs, which we have every hope, will be as abundant and beautiful as ever.

And because we’re still on the sustainable gardening bandwagon (and can’t imagine ever hopping off of it) we’ll make a concerted effort to reduce our water needs by selecting plants with last summer in mind; we’re researching low growing and steppable lawn alternatives to plant in one of the Display Garden beds; and planning to keep invasive weeds out of the native wildflower area behind the summer house in the Bosquet. And because we love our human visitors too – and couldn’t do any of this if it weren’t for you, we’re imagining shady relief from blazing summer sun in our container bed, and planning to install more crowd pleasing roses as well as irrigation in the Rose Garden.

Are you starting to look forward and plan this year’s garden? Do you have a particular area of focus or any new intentions? Is there anything you’d like to see at Blithewold that I haven’t mentioned?

The closer it gets to the holidays – and as the weather slides to the darkest, coldest time of year, the more I think about food. I know I’m not alone. Birds are hungry too. We don’t hang feeders here – there would be no way to keep up with them not to mention we’d need a separate and sizable budget to fund them. But we do offer a few natural breakfast buffets in the gardens and grounds. And after walking around looking for bird food, I have a whole new list of plants that I know need in my own starving garden.

Rather than cut everything back for the winter we leave some seedheads – like rudbeckia and echinacea – in the gardens because they are goldfinch favorites. Seed-eating birds also enjoy certain grasses like the Panicum virgatum ‘Heavy Metal’ planted at the Carriage House (matching the color of the cedar shingles exactly right now) as well as the goldenrod growing wild at the edge of the Bosquet.

Cedar waxwings love their namesake eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana). I had a hard time finding berries to photograph, perhaps because the birds have already come through, or the squirrels got there first, or maybe it just wasn’t a good year for berries with all the heat and drought. I wonder too about the bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica) because I couldn’t find a single berry on any of our plants (and I’m sure we have some females among them). The waxy fruit ripens in September (I have to admit I’ve never paid attention then) and it’s possible birds – any of dozens of different varieties – found them long before I looked. Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) and Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata) berries are already stripped too.

Winterberry (Ilex verticillata) and crabapples (Malus sp. – especially ones with very small fruit like ‘Prairifire’) are into-winter favorites for a lot of different birds. The fruit has to freeze and thaw before being soft enough to gobble up, which gives us gardeners a chance to glean some (visual) sustenance too during our darkest, starved-for-color season.

I know this is a short list – I didn’t touch the viburnums… What do you have in your garden that birds love to eat this time of year and through the winter?