The first days of 2025 was dominated by a week of heavy snow which covered a layer of thick ice and made walking and driving treacherous and for the first time ever we had to dig the car out of the driveway .
One of the worst months of January I remember here in the garden .
January started with a bang across Ireland with heavy snow that lodged and as usual as a Nation we get pretty pathetic about an event that happens only once every ten years or so and which we always seem totally unprepared for and where the country grinds to a halt for the first day or so .
And we are not alone in our dismal lack of preparations as our near neighbour , the UK , also behaves similarly as the front page of the UK Guardian stated on January 8th “Because this is Britain, there is reasonable consternation every time the country seems to grind to a halt at the slightest shift in weather. Britain’s infrastructure has not been built to cope with harsh winters and regular flooding .”
The garden hunkers down and plants and shrubs get through it quite snugly apart from the weight of snow breaking a few branches here and there however for the first day or so it is magical in the garden , a totally new look .
Magical at first but then as I have said you get around the garden and notice the number of shrubs and tree branches bent down and broken by the weight of the snow … the garden will recover and we were lucky to come out of it so well .
The early January snow was followed by Storm Eowyn , the worst storm to hit Ireland in over 100 years with hurricane winds , status red warning across the entire country which left 800, 000 without power and huge damage .
Luckily Clonmel avoided the worst of the winds and we came through relatively lightly in the garden , branches of trees down of course but no major damage … but glad to see the end of this January .
I spent twelve years in the Balkans 1994 to 2006 which meant twelve years of snow from December right through each year to March but the houses were super heated and the roads well gritted and well maintained with snow ploughs and never once was I stuck in snow or unable to complete a journey … all cars were fitted with winter tyres and accidents were rare and it also helped that I was driving Nissan Patrols .
My regular weekly drive in Bosnia for eight years was from Brcko to Sarajevo which would normally take three and a half hours and in snow this would sometimes take five hours especially in January but the journey I dreaded was once a month to Bihac from Sarajevo which normally took six hours but in winter this stretched to nine hours .
Sometimes snow was not the problem in Bosnia on my trips as this report from my Office Diary for January 2003 shows
“I was targeted by nationalistic hard line Serbs unhappy with a multi ethnic recruitment policy I was pushing in a customs administration in Brcko , NE Bosnia where they thought I was bringing back too many Muslims … in this instance they loosened the nuts on a front wheel of my Nissan Patrol as I was on my way to a meeting in Sarajevo , a three hour journey over the mountains in early January in snow and ice conditions … the wheel came off on the return journey and the vehicle only stopped two metres from the edge of a ravine at nine o clock at night ….”
Twenty two years ago this month and I can remember it clearly , 9 pm , heavy snow , no traffic and on my own , one moment driving down the mountain into Tuzla when suddenly a wheel came flying past my window on the left hand side bouncing high as a house and I remember distinctly thinking some poor guy has lost a wheel then suddenly the Nissan Patrol lurched heavily to the left and went down on my side and I have no steering and the vehicle is sliding across the road with me just hanging on tightly to the steering wheel , huge tearing noise and then it stopped … the strange thing is I kept an eye on the bouncing runaway wheel until it veered suddenly off the road to the left and vanished .
I got out of the vehicle saw that the front left wheel was gone looked over the edge of the road about 500 feet straight down into a river , steadied myself then got out a fold up hazard sign and walked back up the road about fifty metres and planted it a metre out and as I was walking back to the vehicle a large US Army truck came tearing around the corner and took the sign out !
The garden in January
January is a totally dead month in the garden as the early spring growth hasen’t kicked in yet and this is the perfect time for cleaning brambles out of the shrubberies as with all the leaves gone and with brambles being evergreen they stand out and there is a great satisfaction in just ripping them out … then following up with a spray of round up to get at the perennial weeds like docks , couch grass and my absolute hated weed the creeping buttercup .
I love self seeding plants and shrubs in the garden as it is a seal of approval from nature that you have created the ideal scenario for that particular seed whether carried by birds or by the wind and of course it is a plant for free .
Big self seeders with us is hypericum which pops up in woodland and on a regular basis each Spring I pot up the seedlings and grow them on until the following November when I plant them out .The summer flowering pampas grass rickardii or Christophe self seeds so prolifically that it has become a pest and these we just dig out and dump .
You have to be careful what you wish for though with self seeders as erigeron or flea bane will self seed in gravel ,in concrete cracks and between paving slabs and to day Snezana spent the morning taking wheel barrows of erigeron off the main patio at the back door … a fabulous plant that flowers for six months but when it likes a place it goes crazy .
Primula and the common cowslips also self seed here and these are terrific plants . This one is a hybrid which I am not a fan of , preferring as I do the common yellow native cow slip and these hybrids normally don’t set seed but this escaped from a pot close by and seeded directly into the front drive way where it comes back every year. .
January is the start of the clean up for the coming year and I give the garden pots a good topping up of compost as the soil always shrinks back and then those pots close to the house I also finish off with a new layer of gravel such as this group of eleven pots which are used only for hostas … always check under pots used for growing hostas as snails and slugs use these areas as hiding places waiting to pop out when the new growth begins … one particular dedicated hosta pot had over thirty snails clustered underneath …. A real WTF moment !
Snezana of course has her own ideas about when to cut back whereas I like to enjoy the sculptural look of the tall miscanthus style grasses until the end of February when their new growth starts and she hates this preferring to scalp everything to the ground as soon as November ends … today she wiped clean an area and thinks it looks great while for me it looks like a bald turkey’s ass !
My absolute favourite Café Bar is run by Karlo Vela in Podgora on the Dalmatian Coast , right on the beach where we sit outside every morning after our daily swim during our regular visits to Croatia from April to late October, enjoying the view out to the islands of Brac and Hvar while having our bijela café .
Karlo’s coffee for the last few years is from Vienna , Meinl Coffee , who have been operating since their Vienna Café opened in 1862 and their web site states their long history with coffee dating back to when “ Julius Meinl opened a new coffee roasting plant on the site where the retreating Ottoman army left behind sacks of green coffee over 300 years before. Since then, 5 generations of the Meinl family have been supplying customers with the world’s leading coffees. For 160 years Julius Meinl has been a leading European coffee company ”.
Back in 1995 when working in Macedonia the EU sent me on a two week computer course to Vienna where I first came across the Meinl coffee brand and used to have a coffee every day in the Meinl HQ coffee shop and I loved the coffee and their history so much I bought a commemorative tin which I use to this day to store our house coffee .
The Meinl distictive red logo shows an Ottoman hat which marks the defeat of the Ottoman armies outside Vienna on September 11th 1683 , a major disaster for the Muslim army and the end of the Ottoman empire in Europe … this defeat was the reason Al Queda picked September 11th for their attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 .
Last summer Karlo was supplied along with his regular coffee supplies some promotional Meinl coffee cups which I loved …these are not on sale anywhere but he must have seen how longingly I looked at them because at the end of the summer he presented Snezana with two Meinl cups and saucers !
I was on Brac Island in September when I came across a café that served Meinl coffee and guess what they also had… a Meinl flower pot outside on the pier … guess what I want for next Christmas !
I love souvenirs that remind me of a favourite place and each morning with my coffee I am transported back to the summer on the Adriatic as I sip from my Meinl cup .
Talk about contrasts to our January snow !
For the last few years we have spent a few days on Brac Island in October and each morning we swim at sunrise off Bol Beach just as the sun rises out of the Adriatic Sea … and yes I know how goody goody pretentious that last sentence reads !
Sunrise swim on Bol Beach , Brac Island , September 2025
Winter showers in the Garden
We take a shower every day throughout the year under an outside shower in the Garden … always cold but never colder than when there is snow and ice !
The usual question when visitors to the garden see the outside shower has always been “ Is it heated ” … !
Colour in the Garden in January
Precious little as you can imagine however our first snow drops popped up on 15th January but most other colour is brought in with the coloured stems of the dog woods and the variegated eleagnus .
There are two eleagnus , both variegated that I wouldn’t be without , maculata pungens and gilt edged , slow growing but evergreen and a must for any garden … reasonable soil and any position except water logged and of the two the variety maculata is the best , a fine shrub but slow to bulk up and with both you need to prune out any green shoots as all variegated eleagnus have a tendency to revert .
What lifts the garden , any garden , in winter is the white bark of the silver birch and these are the backbone of all our winter colour but here I must be specific and say that the multi stemmed silver birch jacquemontii are striking , almost luminous in the low light of January … multi stemmed costs a bit more but are worth it as the common silver birch gets too leggy over time unless you keep it under control almost from the time you plant one .
Bad and all as January was it ended with some good weather that managed to convince us that Spring was just around the corner and our first snow drops flowered on 15th January …. Galanthus Woronowii which comes from Turkey originally … I bought it as a packet of bulbs last year , the leaves are not as nice in my opinion as the common snowdrop nivalis although the flowers are similar as the leaves are short and stubby but it looks strong and I will divide it a few weeks time after flowering .
Hope of better weather in the Lower Garden … last days of January 2025
St. Brigid’s Day and officially the first day of Spring in Ireland is just around the corner !
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