Winter greenery can banish barren look
Most of the plants in your garden are deciduous and will have now lost their leaves, or the lion’s share of them. It will be four or five months before the new leaves appear and another few weeks after that before the full canopy develops again.
In the meantime, the bare branches, though decorative in their own right, lack bulk and substance. Evergreens of various kinds can be used to offset this emptiness and give the garden adequate weight during the strippeddown period. This is provided mostly by conifers and broadleaved evergreen trees and shrubs. And, there is a reasonable choice of nonwoody perennial flowers that are evergreen and make a valuable winter contribution.
A good rule of thumb is to use about one in five trees and shrubs with the emphasis on broad-leaved evergreens, such as holly, laurel, lauristinus, aucuba, skimmia, pittosporum, holm oak and arbutus. Evergreens grown for their beautiful flowers, such as camellia, rhododendrons and pieris, have the additional benefit of providing greenery in winter. Conifers of various kinds can also contribute greenery and also other colours, such as yellow, blue-green and grey-green.
There is a wide range of conifers used, such as cypress, thuya, pine, juniper and yew. Some of these are very large, for instance, some of the big pines and these will be valuable for large gardens and in the backdrop of shelter planting. Small conifers can be used in the garden itself but it is worth noting that some of these eventually get too big and it is easy to overdo them.
Heathers too are available in varied foliage colours such as yellow, brownish, redtinged and grey-green. While the one-in-five proportion is about right in terms of the total number of plants used, it is important to distribute these effectively. They need not be all separated — in fact, they can work well in small groups — but the weight of greenery should not be too concentrated or placed in an imbalance between the different parts of the garden.
While non-woody evergreen plants are not usually considered as winter greenery providers, they can be very useful for filling out at the lower level. Borders with perennial flowers are at least as much in need of greenery in winter.
Ideally, there should be low evergreens for the front of the border and medium ones for the middle. The taller category is probably well enough served by evergreen shrubs. There are lots of good evergreen non-woody plants to consider, such as bergenia or elephant ears, the New Zealand mountain daisy or celmisia, various kinds of carex or sedge, pampas grass, the wand flower, barrenwort or epimedium and hellebores. Evergreen shrubs such as Pieris forest flame (pictured left) stinking iris, which is good in shade, and the pretty Pacific Coast iris, flax flower or libertia, phormium, astelia, and even the small-scale London pride and stachys or lamb’s ear can be very useful.
Just as too many evergreen shrubs should not be grouped together, there should not be a concentration of them in any one area. Try to place these so that they obscure bare earth. Evergreen plants have the additional benefit of being good weed-preventers, because they exclude light all year round.