A Garden Ice Palace

Winter arrived last weekend with a vengeance!  25mm (approximately 1") of freezing rain fell between Saturday and Sunday.  The garden looked like an ice palace!  Everything was covered with a thick sheet of crystal.

Icicles hung everywhere.  Every surface was covered with a layer of ice making going anywhere impossible.

Freezing rain against the window.

 

 
And then the destruction began.  Trees and power lines overwhelmed from the weight of the ice started to break.

Hundreds of thousands of people lost power, many of them still without it a week later.  We were very fortunate.  Living in a relatively new development, our trees are young and power lines are buried underground.  We lost a large section of our redbud and I'm not sure if the tree can be saved.  We'll wait and see what happens in the Spring.

This tree on the boulevard lost a large branch then later that day broke completely in half.  So many trees were shattered and will sadly need to be taken down.  It's heartbreaking to see the damage the storm caused.

This morning the ice has finally melted but it will take months to clean up the destruction.  It makes me wonder how something so beautiful could be so destructive.