New year, new attempt to revive my beloved but neglected blog with a post about my garden in winter. These photos are from midday Saturday January 3rd, 2026.
Here are two slightly different perspectives. One view says, “Sticks are here, amidst other sticks.” Big sticks and little sticks, above and below, in many shades of copper and silver, laying this way and that.
The other view says, “Hill! Sky! Look to the distance!” There’s a broader, hilltop perspective. Both true and both lovely. I think this second view shows more of the tracks in the snow reflecting all the activity that’s going on, even in the dormancy of winter.
As I approached the far side of the garden, an oval-shaped dark gray furry creature toodled away quickly from the garden towards the woods. I am pretty sure it was a vole judging from the velvety dark gray color, the trundling gait, and the other vole tunnel and channel tracks around the garden. I think this line of tracks was made by that hasty vole. I don’t have a before and after photo to confirm, but it’s in the very same spot. For more about identifying meadow vole tracks, see the lovely descriptions and images in this post by Mary Holland.
Quite a lot of teensy prints were clustered in the black-eyed Susan bed:
It makes me wonder whether the seeds are a good source of food. I suspect so, though maybe there’s something else about this bed that makes it appealing. It’s on the southeast corner of the plot. Here are a couple images of dense, intensely dark black-eyed Susan seed heads:
Despite my worry in the “Whodunit” post that the black-eyed Susans weren’t coming back and that possibly the bronze fennel was to blame, they have spread and thrived and have been happy as can be.
Next up, going around to the south-facing bed, are the marigolds. It was a bumper year for marigolds. In the background behind this dried flower head there are some tracks in the snow, but I didn’t look closely enough to figure out who made them:
It’s interesting how the colors fade differently on different flower heads, and the different stages of growth they were in when they froze/dried out. The in-focus one in the photo below is bleached out, glossy, and luminous while the out-of-focus ones are a dull mildewy gray. And the dried head behind them still has petals clinging to it.
Then there are the star-like orange cosmos seed heads, one of my favorites, a little further toward the west on the south-facing bed:
Next to the cosmos, in the southwest corner of the plot, are the dyers coreopsis. I grew them from seed last year, in various colors and sizes, with seeds I’d saved from a previous year, originally from Grand Prismatic Seed. I saved seed again for this summer, and there are still tons of seed heads left, as you can see:
Behind the dyers coreopsis towards the north side is the Japanese indigo bed (also grown from seed, also originally from Grand Prismatic). There’s a lot going on here, with blue-green dried leaves, red-brown stems, and some pinkish-tan dried flower clusters. So beautiful! I know that mice like Japanese indigo seeds (ask me how I know), but in this case they don’t seem to be seeking them out.
In the center of the garden is the madder bed. It was a very productive year for madder seeds, both this this garden at Bramble Hill and in the second-year raised bed at Historic Deerfield. Hopefully that will be the subject of a future post.
I had a hard time convincing my phone that those hard, round, black blobs were truly the things I wanted to focus on, so the madder seeds aren’t quite as clear as I’d like. But here, hopefully, you can see the abundance, even after I collected a lot in the fall:
On the the northeast corner of the garden is the perennial bronze fennel. No wonder it self-seeds everywhere!
This next photo is the curled-up leaves of a woad plant. It’s like it got too hot and threw off the covers in the middle of the night! I’ve never read that woad plants generate heat, so something else is probably going on here.
And last but not least, back on the east side of the garden, the swamp milkweed made a come-back over the past couple years. It has established itself in a couple new spots (another future blog post, hopefully).
