I only realized how much my rosemary bush had grown during the last summer, when I noticed that it had started brushing against me when I walked past it to reach the far end of the garden. I originally planted it as a tiny baby bush (beside the watering can in the photo below) almost two years ago, in May 2010:
During its first sumer, it grew tall and strong enough to survive the winter (if you can call the dusting of snow we had last year "winter"!).
By the beginning of last summer, it already looked like a very respectable rosemary bush (on the right of Ms Scarecrow):
Since then it has continued growing:
By the beginning of autumn, it was taller than Rebecca:
Then, two weeks ago, a weather front blew in from Siberia, dumping a hundred centimeters of snow on the first night, with more in subsequent days. The next morning, Rebecca looked out the window and said: "Mamma, it's all nice and flat out there!" She was right: where our cabbages, parsley, radicchio, and chard had once filled the landscape, now there was a thick, even layer of snow. The rosemary bush was nowhere to be seen:
The Siberian snow is melting ever so slowly, and this weekend we saw the first sign of our rosemary bush: a little green branch, trying to rise towards the still, wintry sky:
Is my rosemary bush well? Is it still alive? We really hope so, but I'm not sure. I'm going to wait until the Arctic winds and temperatures, with their load of snow and ice, have left us before I help him out of his protective snow blanket.




































