Fun with frost

I woke to hard frost yesterday morning, the second of the season. This one, fortunately, fell on a weekend morning. Fortunately? Well…yes. Sunrise was an hour away and a thick fog cloaked everything. I was pleasantly surprised when the wind came up briefly and the fog blew out of the garden, followed by weak rays of sunrise. This presented a perfect opportunity to capture some frost pictures before the icy crystals melted away with the first touch of sun.

Frost can transform plants both mundane and reviled into lacy confections. Witness the seed spike from overly exuberant lemon balm (Melissa officinalis):



Or the invasive garden thug, Himalayan blackberry (Rubus discolor):



But the Cinderella moment won't last long and soon true identities will emerge from beneath their icing.

Frost is interesting in its own right. Water vapor normally passes through a liquid state before freezing. But in the case of frost, the vapor skips the liquid phase and moves on to the frozen state, a process called deposition. Frost isn’t simply frozen dew.

I once saw a short film clip of ice crystals forming on a window as if painted on with an invisible brush. I would love to devise some kind of time lapse setup to capture the frost forming in the garden, the crystals appearing as if by magic from the atmospheric microcosm surrounding each leaf, tendril and blade.

The morning’s frost was quite heavy.The lawn below my garden looked as if it had been covered by a blanket of snow and the seed heads of the heliopsis (Heliopsis helianthoides sp.) were capped with thick spiky haystacks of ice:




As the sun rose higher some of the rays found lawn and garden, creating a patchwork of white, green and brown, a brief winter camouflage.

In a few minutes all had melted and it was time to go back inside to warm up and have some tea. Another lovely Sunday morning spent in the garden chapel.