Nick Bailey explains how to bring some winter-long colour to your garden with unusual foliage plants
Bring winter-long colour to your garden in the form of unusual foliage plants
Ilove the blaze of autumn colours currently filling our gardens and landscapes. It always feels like nature’s finale – a last hurrah to the season. The problem is that once those luminous leaves drop the garden can feel a bit drab. Sure, there’s a good range of winter-flowering plants available, but big blocks of colour are more of a challenge.
The simple solution I’ve found is making use of a range of evercoloured plants. Note I didn’t say evergreens! These plants, of course, have their place but I’m talking about the shrubs, grasses and perennials which hold vibrant, colourful foliage winter-long. Some of them, such as the glowing yellow Choisya ternata ‘Sundance’, are a bit too bright for my taste but they do have their place. I tend to opt for vibrant rather than violent colour in the leaves of the evercoloured plants I select and introduce to gardens. To get the most pleasing colour effect it’s best to sca er these colourblock plants through beds and borders, along with bringing the colour close to the house in patio pots and windowboxes.
There are plenty of obvious bright evercoloured plants, such as euonymus, phormium and ilex, but I try to introduce slightly more unusual species. A fine example of this is
Pseudowintera colorata. It’s a squat shrub from New Zealand with leaves similar in form to elaeagnus, but with a more exciting colour pale e. Pseudowintera has a subtle bu er-yellow leaf but the thing that makes it special is a pinkyred picotee edge to the foliage. This subtle colour combo gives the plant a unique look that works as well mid-border as it does in a pot close to the house. Another unusual shrub is Leucothoe axillaris ‘Curly Red’. This 70cm (2¼ft) high shrub forms a fulsome, dense plant packed with rich red curly leaves through the depths of winter. It’s great as a centre piece for containers, where it can provide a backdrop to bulbs, pansies or ever-coloured grasses such as the silver-leafed astelia. Few other species carry this intensity of red but to really enhance this plant pair it with a variegated or lime coloured pi osporum.
If you have a warmer garden the mirror bush can really cheer up winter. Its botanical name is Coprosma repens. There are lots of varieties in red, pink, burgundy and brown tones but the thing that really makes this plant shine, is, quite literally, its super-shiny leaves. The name mirror bush really reflects its qualities (see what I did there?!). But if you’re looking for true winter wow there is only one plant you need: hebe ‘Heartbreaker’. It’s a bit OTT for some people but the foliage holds fresh pink, lime and cream tones year-round.