Gardening Books

I absolutely adore books and have literally hundreds. But I have a large bookshelf devoted entirely to gardening books. I can't get enough of them. People sometimes say to me 'but why do you have so many? most of them must tell you the same thing' and in some cases this is true, but lots of them contain wisdom that you find nowhere else.
I know that nothing really beats hands on experience in the garden but on a cold winter's evening, browsing through a lovely book, reading about all the things that are possibilities come spring, looking at some photos of a beautiful border or flower and, well, it brings a little bit of Spring or Summer into my house.
However, I think that only a very small handful of 3 or 4 books were actually bought new, the joy of gardening books is that other people seem to throw them out! Most of mine have come from charity shops and I have yet to go into a charity shop that hasn't got a single book on the subject. Mostly they are priced around £1.50 to £2 and this is really a bargain when you consider the a gardening magazine will set you back about £4 and won't contain nearly as much information or photographs as most of these books.

These are my two latest acquisitions:

The price of each was £1.50 and at over 200 pages each that's a lot of book for your money.

So you know what I'll be doing this evening!

Snowed in again here. SO pretty but SO annoying.

Driving Miss Daisy

The sun finally came out. It is amazing how much our spirits are lifted with a bit of bright sunshine. Even the road looks a bit clearer and I did venture out in my car this morning to the next town along. Now I have left my car at the bottom of the hill, so even if it does snow again I won't be quite so trapped.

It is funny isn't it, but as I drove in my car this morning (I did a careful 30 because there is still tons of snow and ice) it never ceases to amaze me that there are people out there pushing you to go faster, even in weather like this. 30 was the speed limit so it wasn't like I was totally dawdling like a maiden aunt, but really, to have someone driving right up to my bumper, lights blazing, in this weather, just makes me cross enough to want to slow down to 20 just to really p him off.

So I did :-)

It's very pretty but.......

.......I'm fed up to the back teeth of it now.

I'm getting grumpy and I'm getting stir crazy. Yes, I love looking out of the window onto such a pretty scene, but I can't go anywhere. I dug my car out just to try and keep on top of things, but it would be foolhardy to attempt to go down the hill in a little ford KA. I will go for a walk in a while to clear out the cobwebs, but oh I wish it would thaw. Tomorrow if it is no better I will have to take public transport to where I need to go, which I don't mind, but it is very very expensive around here (yeah, go figure) and involves that many changes and things that it will drive me mad. It is almost tempting me to walk the 6 miles that I need to travel.

Well, complaint over. It really is very pretty!

Simple pleasures.

In winter everything seems to die off in the garden. Not really true, you just have to look harder and get pleasure from the tiny things.

My first snowdrop, aptly poking through the first snow of the year.

The twinkling lights of the solar powered fairy lights only make it on for about 10 minutes before the battery is dead at this time of year, but for 10 minutes it is very lovely, lighting up the snow.

The snow has it's very own beauty, I sat just looking at it with my morning cup of coffee.

Simple pleasures.