Enjoy breathtaking fragrance
Position scented plants where you can savour their perfume
Keeping a pot of fragrant plants near the door helps to connect you with the garden beyond – even on the dreariest day. Choose a rugged container in terracotta, stone or wood and invest in some pot feet to aid drainage. Choose a loamy John Innes compost, which holds nutrients for longer. Sarcococca, or Christmas box, has clusters of pendant stamens that dangle below evergreen foliage.
Even a small sarcococca packs a powerful punch so a single specimen in a pot, along with some hardy ferns and a tumbling ivy, provides a midwinter beacon of hope. Keep it in a container for a couple of years then add to a woodland border. Feed potted plants with slow-release fertiliser in spring. Sarcococca confusa has ivorywhite flowers and rich green foliage, so it’s extremely elegant. Two other fragrant sarcococcas worth seeking out are pinker-flowered S. hookeriana ‘Winter Gem’ and S. ruscifolia chinensis ‘Dragon Gate’. Or you could opt for flowering Skimmia confusa ‘Kew Green’. Its scent is subtler, but this small evergreen bears conical heads of pale-green buds for weeks before the flowers open.
Larger shrubs such as winter honeysuckle and early-flowering viburnums can be placed near a path or gateway. Lonicera purpusii ‘Winter Beauty’ is a non-climbing honeysuckle with cream-white f lowers that appear in January on bare branches, although new leaves soon follow. This can flower until late March and then it can be clipped back to reduce its size (if left, it forms a six-foot roundel).
Winter honeysuckle cuts well for the vase, as does winter sweet (Chimonanthus praecox). This highly scented Chinese shrub also flowers on bare wood, but needs a sheltered site because its translucent flowers brown in cold weather.
Daphnes are nearly always scented and Daphne bholua ‘Jacqueline Postill’ produces orbs of cool-pink, waxy flowers on a shoulder-high, columnar plant in January. It can be cut back by cold weather and does lose its foliage when it’s very cold, despite being evergreen. A new hybrid, ‘Perfume Princess’, flowers slightly later, but it clings on to its foliage much better in colder gardens. ➤
Even a single specimen in a pot provides a midwinter beacon of hope
Atouch of red is guaranteed to inspire you on a dreary day. While berry-hungry birds will have already stripped any holly berries before Christmas, they won’t yet have tackled the red crab apples of Malus robusta ‘Red Sentinel’. As January wears on, blackbirds, redwings and thrushes will begin to pick them off, adding to the spectacle. You can also get a warm blast of red from heavenly bamboo, Nandina domestica. ‘Obsessed’ (now named ‘Seika’) is a good selection for a sheltered border, with the reddest foliage of all.
Try to find room for Clematis cirrhosa purpurascens ‘Freckles’ too. Its creamy-white bells are heavily spotted in bright-red from November onwards. Hailing from the (much warmer) Balearic islands, it needs a bright, warm, south-facing wall. Ideal beside a pond, scarlet willow (Salix alba vitellina ‘Britzensis’) can be pollarded each spring to encourage bright red-orange, outward-radiating whippy branches. Similarly, the twiggy dogwood Cornus sanguinea ‘Midwinter Fire’ also provides a thicket of coral-pink and orange twigs, but only prune it by a third. It’s less robust than red-stemmed C. alba ‘Sibirica’ or olive C. sericea ‘Flaviramea’, which can both be hard pruned in April. Rich-green is another key ingredient and polypodium ferns produce new fronds in September so they look glorious in winter.
P. cambricum ‘Richard Kayse’ is the Holy Grail but all polypodies look luminous in winter light.
Add a green and gold splash with a (less-prickly) Highclere holly (Ilex altaclerensis). Even in shade, ‘Golden King’ and ‘Lawsoniana’ offer a flash of winter lightning, and berries. ➤
A touch of red is guaranteed to inspire you on a dreary day