What does Hivernant Mean?
There is a bit of a story to our name. Shortly after Hurricane Charlie hammered South West Florida in 2004 we found ourselves working the storm cleanup. Since we were from the north and were “staying” the winter in Florida folks started referring to us as Snowbird tree. There are not always positive connotations associated with the label “snowbird” so we began to think of a different way of expressing our “over wintering.” Turns out that in the great white north, in the colonial days of New France there were the Mountain Men and Fur Trappers that plied the frozen lands of what is now Canada, the Great Lakes and northern New England. The french us the word for winter is “Hiver” (pronounced EE-vair) and the word “Hivernant” (pronounced eee-vair-non, or hee-ver-non) referred to those experienced trappers that had spent at least one winter, or “over wintered” in the wilderness. The word also was used to mean “Winter Visitor.” Seeing as we have spent more than our share of winters in Vermon
