WHY IS THE GARDEN’S MOST IMPORTANT COLOUR

At this time of year we are all keen to put winter behind us and make our gardens look as good as possible for the rest of spring and summer. But take a moment to think about how your garden looked over the past six months. Did it have good structure and shape, even on the darkest, wettest day of winter? Because if the answer is no, now is the time to do something about that for next winter rather than waiting until all the summer colour has played out.

Not all colour though. There is still green, the most important colour in any garden. After all the leaves have fallen and the borders are stripped of every last flower, there is no reason why evergreens should not light up the garden with intense colour. A garden with a rich evergreen structure will retain its shape and interest through the winter and provide the perfect setting for next year’s flowers as they emerge.

Evergreen hedges can be clipped to create form and shape that is important at any time of year, but particularly in winter. No garden is too small – even a little low box hedge around a small bed or a pair of clipped hollies either side of a seat will define that space.

A single evergreen plant in the dead of winter will do the trick if planted judiciously. Hebe, choisya, Portuguese laurel, holly, Irish yew, mahonia, yucca, viburnum, camellia, skimmia, pyracantha, euonymus, some rhododendrons, trachycarpus, hellebore and, best of all, the holm oak are all evergreens of various shapes and sizes, and will add value to any garden.

Our only indigenous British evergreens are holly, ivy, yew and juniper. All others are introductions. I have used yew (still the very best evergreen plant, especially as a backdrop to summer colour), box (although it’s becoming less and less viable as a garden hedge due to box blight and box moth, but if left unclipped it is much more resilient to box blight, if not the caterpillar) and holly as my main evergreen plants, both singly and as hedges that provide green structure to frame out the bleak midwinter. These range from low edging hedges to a yew hedge dividing two sections of my garden that is clipped at just over 2m.

A clipped holly and (inset below) skimmia