A Moody Monday for Moi

My cat is here beside me on the sofa, sound asleep. Sometimes he snores. Soft melodic breaths emanate from his burrowed face, keeping time with the rising and falling of his indulgent girth. But the wind is making such a ruckus that I wouldn't hear him if he were mimicking my husband.

I'm not outdoors much at all now. It's kind of a perpetual symbiotic dysfunction. I don't want to go outside because I lack motivation and I lack motivation because I don't go outside. I've got SAD. I need vitamin D. It might sound contradictory to say I don't mind the rain but I don't mind the rain. What I mind are the dust balls and mountains of laundry that are as certain as taxes and death. It's mid-winter.

On the brighter side, my Viola is blooming. It's a fragrant native that I dug it up on
a friend's property. It must know my penchant for pink because over the years
it has lost all signs of purple.

My number two strategy for "winter interest"
[an obsessive phase a few years back] was to collect as many berried
plants as possible and to locate them for best inside viewing.
[My number one strategy, you ask. Broadleaf and coniferous evergreens.]
My Quasi-Bonsai is Cotoneaster horizontalis [above]. It's deciduous but
holds its berries until spring.

Also deciduous, Aronia arbutifolia Brilliantissima.

A robin's smorgasbord.

Nandina domestica 'Moyer's Red.'

Cotoneaster lacteaus is a broadleaf evergreen with oodles of red berry clusters.
It's one of my favorite plants.

Another photo.
As my plant has matured, I've limbed it up which affords it this
wonderfully weeping.

Viburnum tinus forms its burgundy buds slowly over the winter which give way to
white flowers in spring, eventually ripening into dark blue berries.

Quasi-Bonsai

One of the perks of plant-hoarding is the opportunity to play around, [code for "butcher"] certain plants. Plants that you won't cry [too dramatically] over losing. Plants purchased [rescued] on sale, like the Cotoneaster horizontalis and Erica vagans. Or plants from seedlings like these Japanese Maples. My fussed-over babies are a long way from blue-ribbon status, hence my appointed moniker, Quasi-Bonsai. This leaves room for improvements, like say in twenty years when I can drop the "Quasi."