Visited the Florida Garden for a couple of weeks; just returned

We drove down the day after Christmas, starting early in the a.m. and driving directly into a huge snowstorm. It was pretty but the Carolinas weren't equipped to remove snow as quickly as it fell and we were on slick pavement from SE Virginia through North Carolina and well into South Carolina. It was nerve-wracking but no accidents save 50 or so "slide-offs". Much of I 95 is bordered by mature Loblolly Pines; the odd gust of wind blasted the snow from the trees resulting in a 2-3 ? second white-out. I always say alls well that ends well. We arrived after dark and were greeted by the lights around the pond; the angel is behind our house.

We arrived 10 weeks or so into a drought and in the midst of record low temperatures (it went to the mid-20'sF the first two nights we were there, then warmed nicely for the last week and a half) so there was much brown foliage. Our garden did better than many as I've become a realist and don't grow tender tropicals. The golf courses in the Villages (there are 27?!?!? of them) were surrealistic arrangements of browns, beiges, and tans punctuated by the irrigated greens and the odd occurrence of evergreen foliage.