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The garden doesn’t have to be devoid of colour, scent or structure during the winter months – if you know which plants to plant.
So says Jonathan Webster, curator of RHS Garden Rosemoor In devonWhich this year opened a new and extended winter garden, designed by the award-winning Jo Thompson, which blends traditional and modern elements including grasses, herbaceous plants and pruned trees.
So, how do amateur gardeners create their own beautiful winter garden?
“It’s a balance of evergreen structural plants, whether it’s shrubs or conifers,” says Webster. “Having an evergreen hedge serves as a beautiful backdrop to the garden,” he suggests.
“The colorful bark, vibrant red dogwoods and scents of plants such as Christmas box and Daphne bholua ‘Jacqueline Postil’, which flower all the way through spring, are prominent.
“The combination of all these layers creates something really special.”
structure is key
Consider your vision when creating a border. If you’re looking at your garden from a window in winter, pay attention to the position of your plants so the view is better, he advises.
Consider lighting and how plants contrast with each other and think about repeat plantings, which give a sense of continuity. You may want to clip evergreen plants into balls and pillows scattered across the landscape that will act as focal points in the beds and pull the rest of the winter bedding together.
You can create further structure and interest by using dwarf conifers, berry-bearing plants such as skimmia, as well as witch hazel, winter bedding and ornamental grasses.
To maintain structure, consider not cutting back some of your perennial flowering plants such as helenium and grasses that can provide structure and also seed heads for birds and sheltering insects.
“We leave the grasses standing so you get a beautiful texture when they blow in the wind and later turn a beautiful bronze color. We cut them in March and they start to grow again.
“We’ve planted different varieties of Hydrangea paniculata that will retain their flowers through the winter, so the skeletonized flowers can shine.”
don’t forget the scent
smell Webster says all of this is important in the winter garden.
“If you walk through a garden in winter you don’t really expect to encounter scent. Enjoy the scent of plants like sarcococca, Christmas box, whose flowers hide beneath the plants, or Daphne bholua, which is now flowering all the way through spring, and its flowers seem oblivious to the winter weather.”
Use frost-tolerant plants
“We don’t get as much frost as we used to, but conifers do great in frost because there’s more to cling to, being all laden with leaves. For example, dwarf pines really get highlighted.”
Grasses like panicum and miscanthus also look beautiful in frost.
Enjoy winter in pots
Even if your winter garden is limited to pots, Webster says, you can still enjoy different colored foliage and evergreen structure, whether with shrubs like skimmia or winter bedding.
“Choose things that won’t grow quickly out of a pot. You can use bellis, which produces fluffy pinkish-white flowers, for winter bedding, or polyanthus.
“You can also use potted stems, such as cut willows or cornucopia, to create a display, a structure in a pot.”
Here are five plants you shouldn’t have a perfect winter garden without.
1. White Horn ‘Siberian’
“To me, this is one of the best dogwoods with vibrant red stems,” Webster says.
It is easy to grow and can tolerate many types of soil, but for the brightest winter stems place it in full sun, planted among evergreen shrubs. Prune the stems vigorously in March to promote spectacular display of stems in autumn and winter.
2. Paperbark Maple (Acer griseum)
“If you have space for a small tree, this is my absolute favorite and it’s good all year round because you get beautiful green leaves, stunning red autumn color and then bark that’s exposed in winter.”
3. Daphne Bholua ‘Jacqueline Postil’
“We grow a lot of different daphnes here, but this is by far the hardiest, best performing one, the one that has survived all the cold winters we’ve had here, while others have died. It’s pretty bomb-proof for a daphne.
“And its scent knocks your socks off from 100 yards away. It’s so sweet and fragrant. You smell it before you even see it and the scent wafts into the air.”
It bears pinkish-white flowers, turning pink as the flowers mature.
4. Panicum
These are spectacular ornamental grasses that look great in winter because of the fluidity of their movements.
At the RHS Garden Rosemoor they grow a variety called ‘Sea Mist’, which is a beautiful blue, very light, airy type that grows to about 40-50 cm tall.
“There are some others including Panicum ‘Northwind’ which grow as a column, very straight and in winter they stay as bronze columns. If you plant them in the garden you have these columns of grass, while others curl down at the top.”
5. Holi
There are many hollies, some that take up more space than others, but Webster’s favorite is Ilex aquifolium ‘Pyramidalis’, which grows fairly upright, and produces red berries.
“If you clip it a little neater it looks like it’s been cut and topped and the way it grows looks like an inverted cone. It doesn’t get too high, where you also get a good shape, berries and rich evergreen foliage.”