Our hillside of winter jasmine has been flowering for more than a month...

...it doesn't seem to be especially dependent on winter warmth to flower. It starts early and slowly, then, explodes sometime near the end of winter.This planting in the valley has been here a long time. I like the choice of location because, honestly, though I love and value the cheery yellow flowers in winter, it's a bit coarse and rowdy. It works well at a distance in a space where it has room to roam.

For years I tried, well actually more than tried, to include this in residential landscapes. It's a wonderful plant and great fun especially for those people who didn't know there were plants that flowered in the winter. Still, I suspect I didn't always give it the space that it deserved, and probably eventually took!

It was worth; waiting for....Pat finished the wall adjoining his rock

Pat set it correctly and integrated it into the wall perfectly, if slowly. I love it. Purists might object to the scrapes and dinged edges and I suppose they might have a point, but I prefer to take the long view. In a millennium or so, freezing and thawing and acid rain will have abraded those rough edges to the point where the harshest critic wouldn't see them. And hey, I'm not a harsh critic and I'm pretty sure neither are the vast majority of our visitors. Now we just have to do something about the odd grouping of rocks above it in the bed....