Can spring be far behind?

My garden in mid-December. I thought it would be fun to compare it with what the same areas look like in the summer. Also, at this time of year, we all need to be reminded that winter won't last forever.

The same garden beds in the sping, when the Lady's Mantle (that yellow patch), the delphiniums (the blue) and the roses (pink, in the background) are blooming.

Same area, slightly different angle, showing some of the brighter pink peonies in front of the roses.

In mid-December, the dead delphiniums stalks are black tubes that I leave standing for nesting insects. The peonies have been clipped at the base for next year’s growth, the astilbes are blackened seed pods and what remains of the daisies is an unruly tangle of brown and green. Since this is Vancouver, there is still lots of green from evergreen shrubs and trees, and there has been no snow (yet) to turn the lawn into a snowy field. But it’s a flattened, brown-and-grey time of year, when my gardening neighbor Audrey puts out signs on her flower beds that say, “Shhh, the garden is sleeping.” After spending a bleak couple of hours in the early dark of a winter afternoon clipping dead hydrangea blossoms yesterday, it was almost a shock when I later opened some picture files showing the same place in the spring. What glorious exuberance! What a surge of growth and colour! From bleak deadness to hopeful life, something Percy Shelley may have had in mind in the concluding line of his Ode to the West Wind: “O, Wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

The view from the back pathway toward the garage, now hidden by trees, and the bench. 

Irises and astilbes fill that area in the spring. 

A little further up the path, the peonies and roses are in the foreground, looking toward the bench.

The birdbath area in winter,

The birdbath is virtually hidden in summer behind all that greenery -- ferns, hostas and three kinds of daphne.

Looking toward the basement door in winter, dead daisies in foreground.

That end of the house is virtually hidden by the flower beds in summer.

A similar angle, featuring the delphiniums.

The back pathway, which often gets so overgrown in summer that it is virtually unusable.

And this is why it's unusable: the hostas, astilbes and Solomon's Seal don't confine themselves to flower beds.

Another view of that back-path jungle.

Peonies with buttercups, which are terrible weeds. I included this picture as a nod to the resilience of buttercups; they, too will be back again in the spring.