Here in Tuscany the forecast is for some serious cold as well for over the week-end; one weather site says it'll get down to -10 Celsius on Saturday; -8 on Friday and Sunday (14 degrees and 17 degrees Farenheit). Yikes,I hope they're wrong. All of my Teas are too big to protect, I think,plus both myself and my DH are kind of under-the-weather with some virus-type thingie,so I really don't want to go out there in the cold and risk making myself sicker.

Actually the link given under 'temps' above is updated real time and now it looks as we might escape the worst of it. From a -5C low and a total freezout on Sunday it says now it might just get above freezing by noon. Although things might well change again.

This is the pic of 'Ariadne' depression that's coming directly from Siberia.

Bart, about five years ago we had the severest cold I've seen since I came to Italy: temperatures in the low teens for two weeks. I had a lot of Teas and other warm climate roses at the time and none of them suffered any damage that I recall. If they're in active growth when the cold strikes the young growth might get frozen back a bit, but nothing serious. Most of the warm climate roses are supposed to be hardy through zone 7, i.e., down to about 0F. The Lady Banks roses are rated hardy through zone 8, if I remember correctly: mine also suffered no damage. Italy doesn't offer much that roses recognize as cold. I wouldn't worry about them.

Indeed roses of any kind are difficult to damage with the sort of temps one gets around the Med unless one gardens at high altitude. Young shoots , even of the hardiest roses, can easily be damaged by freezing winds though. I'm not really worrried about my roses but I'm worried about my citrus.

One more pic I found showing the Acropolis during the recent snow storm. I found no photo attribution.

Temps in the 70's yesterday and today. Lulling my plants into a false sense of security, since this weekend I think we will finally get freezing temps in the 20's (-3C one night and -5C the next). Highs in the 40's- brrr. And I have no problem blaming Putin for this.

Try to stay warm everyone- just 75 days until the vernal equinox!

Virginia

Looks like photoshop but it's real. I love the Parthenon and would like to see it one day. I enjoyed the reproduction in Nashville Tennessee and they tried to be as accurate as possible. Thank you for posting that wonderful picture. I use Christmas lights on my Australian lemon and on a ficus and I put my bromeliads and orchids in the branches and cover it with burlap when a freeze is forecasted. I would be packing the garage with plants if I thought snow was coming. I don't like wind, hot or cold.

Thanks for the link Nik. It looks like my garden received between 11-12 inches last year.

I am not looking forward to the weekend. It looks like "Ariadne" is going to bring some very low temperatures. I have a new, young lemon and a mandarin tree, recently planted. Fingers crossed.

I am a bit closer by road, to Sitia, than Aghios Nicholas or Elounda. I was thinking of driving down to Mochlos on Friday, Epiphany, to watch the cross being thrown into the harbour and all the local young men diving in to recover it, but that depends on how soon Ariadne arrives.

I hope everybody's roses and plants come through the chill okay.

Daisy

The pictures of the acropolis under the snow are fascinating; thanks for posting them.Nik. Today's lowest temperature forecast is for-9,but my land is a bit higher up than the towns,so it could get lower out there. Often my car thermometer reads about 3 degrees higher down here in comparison to up there, but I don't know how accurate that is, since the car itself warms up as one drives it. Tea roses aside, I'm now worrying a bit about the two cedrus libani that I planted out less than a month ago; one site says that these are only cold-hardy down to -10 C, so we'd be flirting with the line there. I guess I should just buck up and plan on going out there tommorrow to cover up the baby cedrus libani; those things are kind of hard to find...

We on our south-facing hillside perched midway up the hill actually are warmer than down in town, which sits in a valley where cold collects, gets less sun than we do, and is more humid because of the river. They're about six hundred feet lower than we are.

Now we did get a 15 degree F low last night, but had about a foot of snow to insulate the roses yesterday, so hopefully the Teas will be OK, fingers crossed. One more similar low expected then temps rise.

The snow is beautiful. I wish we'd get some,though I'd be content with rain, too.

We are expecting about 5 inches of snow here, and everyone is in a panic. You all remember the Snowmageddon we had a few years ago where people were stuck overnight because of a few inches of snow (granted there was also ice). But we have very little snow removal equipment and if the temps stay low and the sun isn't shining, the snow just sits there. IME teas should be good unless it goes down to zero. Thats when I lost all the above ground growth on my teas, but they came back strong from the roots.

Real winter hit at last with 6 inches of snow and wildly varying temperatures, high 19F today with -5.8F expected tonight. But it will get very much warmer in a few days, possibly with rain but I hope the snow will stay. Our local snow removal firm is very good and beginning this season homeowners are no longer responsible for removing the snow on the pavement outside their houses and sanding it. A headache less, especially for older people.

I don't worry much about my roses, I am almost hoping some of them will die and leave room for other shrubs. I am too tenderhearted to to dig up a good rose and need some help from the weather.

I think your Teas will be fine, Sheila: we had very similar weather five or six years ago and mine came through it with no trouble. The low here today was, supposedly, around 20F. I find it hard to believe it was that cold seeing the cheerful blooms on the roses close to the house: 'Odorata', 'Sanguinea', and even 'Archduke Joseph' up in the persimmon, all look perfectly happy, and their flowers too.

Those snowy photos are beautiful. I want precipitation!!!

No snow here like Sheila in SW OR, but our temp in Portland dropped to 18 or 19 last night! Plus wind. Brrrr! I think I murdered by neglect and exposure a couple of 4" potted perennials that were never planted last fall. Sigh. Carol

Crete

Here are some photos from yesterday on Crete. None are mine, as I spent he day indoors waiting for an electrician. A snowstorm with thunder and lightning took out my electricity and landline at dawn. Luckily he was able to reach me at dusk, after the police re-opened the road.

The Palace of Knossos looks strange under snow, the last time I was there it was scorching!

The last photo is more mundane, it is my local filling station.

Daisy

It's not Minnesota, it's Kastoria Lake, in Kastoria city, northern Greece.

2F today..

Photo by Kostas Kapourgas.

Skopelos town sea front, island of Skopelos, Western Aegean

Photo by George Kokkoris

The hills over the town of Florina, northern Greece

Skiathos town port, island of Skiathos, Western Aegean

Axios (Vardar) river, near Thessaloniki (Salonica) city, northern Greece

Unbelievable! Beautiful, but shocking. My cistus have a few broken branches from the heavy snow. I hope yours are spared.

I had but a light sprinkling in my garden. The problem is the low temps and the freezing wind. I'm sure there will be some damage in my citrus but I will have to survey the extent of it once the weather warms up a bit. Lots of fruit on the trees as well which I doubt if it was spared..

Sorry to hear that Nik. Sounds like climate change is serious sad business.

They seldom spend the night inside but the last couple of nights they did.

...dear little babies, they do like to cuddle up near a heat source. I'm surprised to see a radiator there in southern Greece, presumably like our central heating fuelled by natural gas...? some people have oil... but obviously you do get some chilly periods..

No natural gas mains where I live. It is diesel and bl**** expensive for that matter due to high taxation. Almost 1euro/lt last time I checked (about 4$/gal to you US guys. You should never complain about high fuel prices...). I need more than 1000lt in an average winter and our winters are generally very mild.. Some heating is usually needed here from November to late March unless you come from Siberia in which case I suppose you don't need it..

Aris hates it when he's inside. Too warm for him I suppose. I just bring him in because he feels lonely if left outside alone.

Woke up this morning to a garden blanketed in snow.. Most has melted since but more is expected tonight..

We mainly just use our wood-burning stoves to get through winter,though with this cold spell we've been using the heat as well.It's just too cold, and I still can't get rid of this stupid virus I have...

Gosh that's terribly expensive Nik, working it out at around 1000 euros for your winter fuel bill would be a lot more than even we pay here and my heating is on virtually all the time, temperature controlled of course, but expect to pay equivalent to about 460 euros [485 US$] for the period Sept - March for my gas. Electricity is separate and much less than that.

In my village we get indoor heating and hot water by underground pipelines from our local district heating plant. All kinds of debris is burnt, biomass from gardens, garbage etc. Some cities buy garbage from outside.

http://www.svenskfjarrvarme.se/In-English/District-Heating-in-Sweden/

What splendid snow pictures! This So CA girl loves it! We've had much needed rain with more on the way tomorrow. We've already had more than all of last winter. I'm hoping for a wonderful spring show. Lisa

Bart, has it rained/snowed in your area?

Here we've had no precipitation since November, and that with most of Italy, it seems, getting drenched or buried under snow. Also nothing in the forecast.

It's cold here, too, and we stick to our living room where the wood stove is. This is our only heat except for LP gas heat in the bathroom. I may finally be getting over my own tenacious virus that I caught just before Christmas. Maybe. Just focus on the thought that you will get well one day.

Marlorena, that sounds cheap to me.

Marianne, I wish your municipalities would buy our trash. Or teach us how to make clean-burning waste disposal plants.

P.S. Oops, I "liked" my own post. That ought not to be allowed. Apologies to all.

I love the idea of heat from clean-burning, waste disposal plants. I have two wood burning stoves. Wood for them costs me 100 euros per 1 cubic metre of olive wood, delivered. I am currently using the 5th delivery and it is not yet mid January!

Daisy

Daisy,

That's a lot of wood you're burning there. I suppose that's not your average in your generally mild winters, is it?

Btw here's the link for meteo stats for Sitia since you're closer to it than Ag. Nikolaos. According to this you've had 4 times the precipitation we've had this month and more than 60% more for the whole of last year.

After the snow we're in the middle of a, most welcome, rainstorm over here. To be precise the rain part of it is welcome not the storm.. High winds again, only now they are warmish from the South rather than freezing from the North. It seems we can't avoid them being between the Steppes and the Sahara or the Russians and the Arabs depending on one's point of view.. I hate the wind..

The old ruined medieval Byzantine town of Mystras in the Southern Peloponesse, near Sparta..

Greece is beautiful,with and without snow..I'm hoping we'll get some real rain and snow, especially the latter;I don't think it's quite as bad here as it has been in Melissa'a area,or in the north of Italy in general (I've read that the Italian Alps are still devoid of snow!!!),but it's still been way too dry. Looking at the forecast on some weather sites makes me think that I may not be able to get out to my land for the entire month of January,for some of them give the impression that it's going to rain, then freeze, and then snow off and on for the next two weeks, with temperatures never getting much above freezing. If it does indeed do that, I might not be willing to risk trying to drive up there, since much of the road faces north ,and therefore can be far more icey than most of the roads in our area (I am not a confident driver and don't have a four-wheel-drive car,let alone a jeep).But we need the rain, and snow is even better. I just hope it won't do this "gelicidio" thingie : a situation where, due to some combination up in the stratosphere,the precipatations don't come down in the form of snow, but remain rain which freezes as soon as it hits the ground...or the branches and stems of the plants!!! Needless to say, THAT is very damaging indeed! The risk of this makes me kind of glad that I DID go out there to protect my little cedrus libani,and wish that I could've protected all my new cypresses as well.

Here's shot of my Hybrid Musk roses in PDX, OR! We've been hit by storm Jupiter! Carol

Wonderful drone video from the northwestern city of Ioannina, Greece. Enjoy

https://vimeo.com/199046948?ref=fb-share&1

And a short drone video showing snowed on Acropolis

https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/world/video-epic-drone-footage-captures-greeces-snow-covered-acropolis-youve-never-seen-before

It was romantic but only if you were somewhere warm WITH power and water, things sorely missed by many snowed in villagers in mainland Greece and on the islands... Glad it's over and we finally managed to send this thing to Marlorena where it belongs.. hohoho... Yesterday and today we had glorious sunny days with a more than 12 degrees C rise in temperature..

Really good drone footage there, quite spectacular, especially enjoyed the first one from Ioannina...

Sorry to disappoint you Nik, but we missed out here on the 'Thundersnow' as it was reported. We had just a light shower, bit of sleety stuff. We usually get a lot more and I was quite looking forward to a good snow cover today, but it's been a somewhat benign winter so far... this snow storm apparently originated in Canada... we're trying very hard to keep Russia out of our lives at the moment [difficult]...

Like a LOT, Marolena, especially as being an uber-anti-trumpeteer!!! Politics aside, i do hate this "Burian" or "Buran" thing that comes from Russia. Here to our area in Tuscany, this bas***d just brings super DRY cold. It's amazing; just on the other side of the Appenines-at our same latitude, mind you- they get copious snow...generous, nutritive snow, that feeds the ground water, and brings fecundiity,and makes us safe for the drought of summer,right? However, many of these areas are ones that were so damaged by the earthquakes earlier in the year that the people can not rejoice in Nature's bounty; they are freezing in tents, their homes have been destroyed..."it's an emergency"...jeez, what can you say???

.Here,with this weather combination, the best we can hope for is a bit of "powdered sugar"-type snow; last time we had this dam' Burian, the snow was so dry, it was exactly like powdered sugar, seriously! like dust! almost devoid of water, if that makes any sense??? so little of it, too! And along in it's ugly backpack, this dry cold brings us these horrid intestinal viruses that do NOT want to go away, and what to do to shake them off??? So far, thank Heaven, it doesn't seem as bad as it was a few years ago-here, for us, in our little "happy island" (hope that a bit of my ironic tone is being conveyed...)when this Buran thing last presented itself; for example, today, thank generous Heaven, we did get a good rain here in my area.So, I'm grateful for the rain, mates...

Dry, dry, dry here, and since it's also very cold (by Italian standards) the hoses are frozen and we can't water. It will be interesting to see how the plants we put in the ground in the fall do. In my seventeen years in Italy this is a new kind of winter for me. Naturally it can change, but at the moment there's no precipitation, or warming, in the two week forecast.

That powder dry snow is the best for skiing you know... when there's plenty of it.

Ioannina in snow was really beautiful but I'm also glad it's over when I think of how cold it must have been for our friend's family in the small village of Gorgomilos in Epirus where we once went for a wedding. I don't think they had much heating in their farmhouse.

I should like to see what Metsovo looks like in snow, must look even more like a Swiss village than it does in summer.

Mariannese,

Pictures of Metsovo in snow from Jan 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPvUHOG69K4

Any farmhouse will have at least wood stove(s) and more often than not also a fireplace.

Thanks for that! Metsovo did indeed look even more like a Swiss alp village with the snow. So many houses were built with wood.

Of course they hade stoves and fireplaces but not in every bedroom.

I'm a lot happier in general with wood stoves rather than with radiator-type heating; there's a part of me that agrees with Nik's Aris, that it just gets "too hot"" indoors.Staying at my mother-in-law's apartment in Enna, Sicily is always a trauma,thermetically and otherwise: it's either roasting hot in that place or freezing cold! No such thing as a wood stove or fireplace in sight, of course. But with this creepy intestinal virus (get periodically drenched with sweat,alternated with "feeling cold",in a pre-menopausal way,lol) ,and the unusually low temperatures, I end out using the heat system here at home,impossible as it is to regulate.Keeping the heat on constantly in this big place is unthinkable,not to mention un-ethical, even if one would think it! .We've only been in this house about a year; I think it takes time to get the jist of a new house,but I still think that in the long run, the wood-burning stoves are just the best.

Gosh, I want to get out to my land!

I like wood stoves, too: the quick and intense heat; the sensory aspect, that you hear and see and even smell a wood stove; we also use ours to dry clothes and heat bricks and sometimes food or water. A wood stove has a presence; it's a hearth for the home in a way no radiator can ever be. That said, they're polluting, not to mention labor-intensive and messy. There's a symmetry to all this: significance requires work, and brings disorder with it.

We have just one stove, in our living room, which means that we all get cozy in cold weather. Perhaps it's just that DH, DD, and I get along anyway, but I think it helps that we spend our hours at home together in this small space, talking, sharing the books we're reading and what we're seeing on our computers. I must say it helped when DD got earphones and I didn't have to listen to her and DH's music for hours on end.

Bart, I get you about wanting to get out to the garden, and I hope your turn comes soon! Fortunately for me mine is right here, and even when my cold was worse than now I could step out now and then when temperatures were mild and prune the wisteria on the pergola in front of the house.

Yesterday we had an amazing miraculous day of decent weather. I was out for several hours (wow), shearing weeds, digging out a patch of Bermuda grass, pruning the Teas, that needed it badly, tidying an orange peel clematis. Which may not be very comforting to you, but sickness does end one day, and so does bad weather. I wonder if, when the weather does finally improve, we may not suddenly get well? I have a notion these stubbornly prolonged illnesses are linked to the cold and dreary conditions of these last weeks. Possibly to an excess of indoor life, too.

I love the old huge kitchen wood stoves which you could use for cooking and baking and to keep the kitchen warm. I wish I had a large country house kitchen where I could install one of those. There are terribly expensive if you can find one. In the old days the kitchen was where everybody stayed during cold winter evenings. There was one in the old house where I was born and even though we left that place when I was about 5 to live in a modern apartment (what a horrible invention) I still have faint and fragmented but warm memories of it with my grandma and her sister sitting around cooking and talking.

We had something like that when I was young, it was called a 'Rayburn', and we cooked on the top which had hot plates to put the saucepans on, and a roaring fire in the middle, which we used coal or anthracite. Sometimes wood was thrown in.

We all huddled around it most of the time as there was no such thing as central heating in those days except for the well off I suppose. Now they have 'Aga's', which are really expensive and rather posh. I've used one but I found it difficult to judge when things were cooked in the ovens, but they gave out a lot of heat I must say that.

No, it's not the Alps...

Ski mountaineering on Crete's 'White Mountains'. Enjoy...

https://www.facebook.com/pierracreta/videos/792069040944976/

One of the hall of fame hockey stars from Canada was interviewed during an NHL game and said his family used to go into the main room, start the wood stove and shut the heavy wood doors and watch hockey on a small black and white television back in the day. 5 boys and two parents plus a cousin or two all together in that small room staying warm and cheering on their team. Then the kids would play hockey the next day on a frozen lake and argue about who was the best player the night before.

Well, we did get some snow here in my area,which is good. But I can't feel very jubilant. The areas of central Italy, already devastated by the earthquakes of a few months ago,are getting mountains of snow, and there's been yet another earthquake. A luxury hotel was buried last night in a landslide of snow, and it's been very difficult for rescuers to get up there because of the snow. This sure is a bad period that the world is going through; maybe I should just quit reading the news...

I hope Melissa's area got some precipatation. Some areas of northern Italy are suffering real drought; no rain for the past 60 days,even some wildfires in Liguria, if I'm not mistaken.So, so sad...

Congratulations on your snow! You needed it. As for here, no precipitation, and none in the forecast. On the other hand no forest fires or earthquakes. And temperatures are forecast to rise starting in a few days. Good. I'm tired of it being freezing all the time.

This has been kind of a bad weather year for much of Italy, it seems to me.