Winter wonderland
Seasonal blooms, attractive evergreens and architectural shrubs will ensure your garden looks glorious through the coldest months of the year
THINK of winter gardens and what comes to mind? A white landscape with a snowman and icicles dripping from gutters? Or a plumber’s van hurtling up the drive on an emergency call-out for a burst pipe?
I’d rather you pictured a proper gardener’s winter garden – the sort that makes you want to put on a warm coat and boots and go outside for a wander.
If your real-life garden doesn’t quite come up to scratch, it’s time to build in the elusive winter wonderland factor. It’s worth doing, wintry weather lasts for four months – and that is a third of your gardening year.
Your top priority is to improve the winter views from the back windows of the house, since most garden watching is done from indoors over this season.
The second priority is to devise a winter walk around the garden.
An ideal route should start from the house and then disappear through an arch, round a bend or behind bushes, then wind its way around the garden past a succession of winter features and then back to the house.
But there’s no need to redesign the whole garden. When your existing planting scheme has been put together for spring and summer interest, simply add to it.
A fair chunk of winter interest comes from evergreens, so use those
to beef up a garden’s existing framework.
An evergreen hedge and dwarf box edgings to paths and flower beds are enough to leave you with a good-looking skeleton when the rest of the garden is bare in winter.
And you can turn a mixed border into an all-year-round one by adding evergreens. These make a natural backdrop to a changing tapestry of deciduous foliage, grasses and flowers in spring, summer and autumn, and then take over the interest in winter.
You don’t need a big garden to pull it off. Think of hebes, hellebores, nandina, euphorbia, rosemary, phlomis and thyme, plus grassy-looking ophiopogon and carex. Other options are real grasses such as dwarf pampas and Stipa gigantea, and semi-evergreens such as heucheras and lamium, which keep their foliage except in exposed situations or during cold winters.
Where you want a handsome specimen to form a yearround focal point, choose something architectural such as phormium, fatsia and bamboo, or an evergreen shrub that has a second string to its bow, such as Garrya elliptica, with its dangling green winter catkins.
And if you want something to liven up a group of conifers, add clumps of dogwood – the bright red stems of Cornus alba ‘Westonbirt’ or the orange-red flame shades of Cornus ‘Midwinter Fire’ are two of the best ways to bring life to dark backgrounds.
For an inspiring winter landscape you need winterflowering shrubs. Use them to decorate your journey around the garden and group them with evergreens to make a series of cameos.
Grow winter-flowering climbers and wall-trained shrubs on the house walls and porch.
Use the front garden to the full for small, choice, winter flowers. Grow them in good-sized groups so they really show up. And underplant borders with carpets of very early springflowering bulbs.
They’ll pull together your scheme at the end of winter and carry it into spring.