Snow - the arbiter of good taste?

More snow this morning has transformed the Garden again. It's all looking rather lovely and the Head Gardener has an excuse not to spend the day atop his shaky ladder pruning the apples!

But snow has the marvellous ability to conceal as well as highlight, and generally it has rather good taste!

It offers an old master's interpretation of one's garden, ignoring petty detail and highlighting features of note with large extravagant brush strokes! Weeds are obliterated, awkward corners are simplified with a flourish and the bin store can almost become a thing of beauty!

With Old Master Snow, structure is everything! Walls, steps, trees, hedges, topiary, statues, large pots are celebrated. We've seen this recently in some lovely insta-pictures from the stately homes. But snow can be subtle too - little white Pom-poms on ornamental seed heads, twigs etched with perfect white highlighter, stone figures' faces subtly touched up with white mascara.

And snow can be creative as well; in one of our beds, it has arched over all our Verbena bonariensis like some kind of wicker structure, which is quite eye-catching and transiently beautiful. That said, it hasn't quite worked with our Bamboo, which just looks as if a panda has sat in its midst! Never mind, it will bounce back!

As gardeners, I suspect most of us in the UK get frustrated by snow as we're really not used to it and it disrupts our winter work. We want to clear it away as soon as we can. I anticipate that for gardeners elsewhere in the Northern hemisphere, where snow is assured between December and March, there is perhaps a little more tolerance shown. And after all, it is a day off pruning those apples!