Flâneur Gardening

>One of the things I love about being up in the summer house during winter is all the signs of the creatures that inhabit the garden when we’re not around. Tracks across the snow-covered lawn, nests where deer have laid down for the night.

This is just one example of the tracks on the otherwise immaculate white surface of the lawn:

And here is one of several spots in the garden where the snow has been melted away by a deer that chose to spend the night at our place:

They do tend to make themselves scarce when the house is inhabited, but occasionally I see them early in the morning when I get up and it’s still dark outside. One morning a few weeks ago I almost hit a deer on the head with the front door when I opened it to air the house and got a minor shock when I realised a deer was grazing literally on our doorstep. (That was the same weekend I almost stepped on a pheasant when returning from a trip to the supermarket in the late afternoon after dark.)

The roof is well enough insulated for the snow cover to remain even when the house is heated up for 4 days, but the bottom layer of snow does melt a bit, especially above the wood-burner, and this causes some quite spectacular icicles to form.

And there’s one thing you can only do during winter: Taking a shortcut home from a trip to the supermarket by walking across the frozen fjord… Quite spooky in the afternoon as the light disappears, but also excessively pretty. The ice was easily solid enough to be safe, especially since I stayed close to the shore where the water is only about a foot deep. No reason to tempt fate, after all, but still a great experience, and one that is fairly rare in Denmark. We rarely get cold enough winters for the sea to freeze this much.

And when I got home, this is what awaited me; a bottle of Champagne chilled on home-grown icicles (so at least the garden does yield useful crops even in this weather), accompanied by foie gras and toast. The perfect snack for a game of Yatzy! (And a nice way to celebrate the last evening in the summer house before returning to Copenhagen and New Years celebrations.)