Winter wonders
To ensure your garden looks good all year round, plan now for the colder months ahead with topiary and evergreens
How good does your garden look out of season? Go on – be honest. Too many people settle for browned-off borders offset by shaggy lawns and thickets of bare twigs, shrugging off their dismal surroundings by thinking, “Well it’s winter, what do you expect?”
But a garden does not magically appear for six months of summer – it surrounds you for 365 days a year, so why not create a scheme that will look good whatever the season?
I always think of the Sussex garden of my old friend, the late Christopher Lloyd. The basic framework was created by his father Nathaniel Lloyd using the great architect Edwin Lutyens. Together they designed the backbone of yew hedges, paths, steps, paving and arches heavily decorated with topiary, leaving beds and borders like a blank canvas to be painted with flowers.
If you visit Great Dixter in summer, what you’re aware of are its flowers and plants. The background topiary, stone paths and decorative steps add a richness, but as features they take a back seat – until winter, when the floral spectacle dies down and a new, sculptural landscape emerges. With everything tidied, supports taken out and bare ground forked over and mulched, suddenly it almost looks like a second garden in the same place.
If you have a well-planned garden that just needs more winter interest, you can often fine-tune what is there without major changes. Beef up
borders with an outline of lowclipped box edgings, or divide them into a series of box-edged planting bays.
An area of lawn looks instantly more interesting given a trio of clipped evergreen topiary. Try planting three different-sized spheres running into each other.
A long, straight evergreen hedge can be given off-season appeal by having a peephole cut through it, opening up views beyond. Alternatively, you could clip a castellated top or grow a couple of taller towers or a pillar, crowned with a topiary shape.
Even a patio can be wintered up by outlining the shape with low evergreen edgings and adding a few pieces of potted topiary and a trough of winter bedding. These are all things you can do right now for immediate effect.
Airy seed heads, large leaves and bare twigs look sensational outlined in frost, so arrange a few ornamental grasses, large-leaved evergreens and Sedum spectabile close to the house (where the frost melts last).
Include as much colour as you can. A dark evergreen background of hedging such as yew sets off yellow, orange or red witch hazel blooms perfectly, and large-leaved Fatsia japonica teams wonderfully with winter jasmine on a wall.
Cotoneaster franchetii offers bright red berries, while blue to blue-green conifers look stunning behind clusters of redstemmed dogwoods.
Make the most of contrasting shapes to create effective winter cameo plantings. Choose from long, lean bamboo stems and large evergreen leaves that are smooth, thick and rounded (bergenia), strap-shaped (phormium) or long, oval and leathery (Viburnum rhytidophyllum).
To keep costs down, root cuttings of box, rosemary, euonymus and bay during the summer and train your own potted topiary shapes over preformed frames. Keep them in pots while they are young and you can stand them in place temporarily wherever you need winter interest.
If you are starting from scratch or making major alterations, it’s worth thinking architecturally and planning your scheme out to scale on squared paper. Starting from the house, aim to create a journey through the garden that wanders round a series of small cameo features.
You can create natural features that look good in winter if you make a wildlife-friendly log pile with woodland plants round them, with a decent stand of red-stemmed dogwoods just offside.
If your garden is tiny, create a small formal knot garden – an area of gravel decorated with low- clipped evergreens planted in complicated patterns which can be filled in with flowers in summer. Clipped evergreen hedges, an attractive hardwood seat and a statue standing on stone paving complete the scene.
So don’t write off your patch in winter as it has got plenty of potential. Just think about structure and you’ll soon discover your inner secret garden.
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Even a patio can be wintered up with some evergreen edgings