Snow blindness, snow panic

At this time of year gardeners panic about one thing - snow and what it'll do to their plants. Well panic not - it'll do very little damage per se. It's the cold and frost you need to worry about!

Even hardy plants can suffer from extensive periods of cold, freezing weather, especially if they're growing in containers (even the hardiest of plants can be killed if their rootballs freeze solid for weeks on end) and even more especially if the cold is combined with strong winds.

In fact, snow on the ground provides some insulation against cold, freezing weather and is a blessing in disguise. Until it melts that is, and the garden becomes waterlogged!

I guess there is one thing to worry about snow - snow loading. That is the weight of snow on branches and the foliage of evergreens bending them down to ground level or even causing them to snap.

I've had one casualty in the garden so far. An old tree stump covered in ivy became so snow loaded that all the ivy has bent away from the stump and flopped all over my lean-to greenhouse. It needed a prune anyway and this has given me the incentive to go out and do it - maybe this weekend if I don't freeze to death when I go out there. Being a gardening journo I spend most of my time sitting on my bum in a nice warm office.

The only thing that will panic over the stump/ivy situation is the robin who has nested in there for the last three years. But with some 'judicious' pruning I should be able to save its nest site for years to come.