It’s late January and mid-winter, but your yard doesn’t have to be blah! Design your garden to be an inspiration all year round. You don’t have to hire someone to do this. It is very easy to see what it needs at this time of the year, as most of the foliage has been stripped away. What is left is your garden’s structure. This includes but is not limited to solid objects like the pathways, the arbours, the trellises, stone walls, bird baths, statuary or even your garden’s hedges. At this time of year, they can really draw your eye.
Evergreen shrubs offer a welcome addition to any landscape. In mid-winter, they become a design element in their own right. As I mentioned in my last column on the classical Chinese garden, rhododendrons, with their broad-leaved evergreen form, offer a soft smooth accent to the landscape. Bamboo, a semi-evergreen plant with a strong upright form, makes a great vertical accent. Holly and yew offer vibrant green colour to your winter landscape, as well as bright red berries. Compact forms can work well in many situations from ground covers to foundation plantings or even as a hedge or screen to hide unsightly views year-round. There are a number of other evergreen shrubs that can be used as focal points or general background. The cooler temperatures in winter often play with their foliage colour, turning greens to orangey red or blues to a purple hue. Often, interesting shapes are made even more spectacular when accented with a light snowfall.
Many perennials with great fall colour and shape retain their upright structure through winter if left alone. Autumn Joy sedum, rudbeckia and many grasses like the ever-popular feather reed grass add another element of interest to your winter landscape. If need be, you can use these areas to pile snow and it won’t bother the plants’ structure next spring. Hydrangeas with their dried flowers left on them work in much the same fashion as the herbaceous perennials, except they have woody stem structure that will require a little pruning come March.
Many deciduous shrubs offer interesting shapes or bright-coloured berries. More common selections are plants like the high bush cranberry, dwarf mountain ash, wild roses or even the dwarf winged burning bush. Other plants you might consider are the native Oregon grape, with its powder blue berries, evergreen leaves and reddish new growth. It has year-round appeal. Red osier dogwood comes in red-, purple-or even yellow-stemmed varieties. If you prune out the four-year-old stems every year, you are left with a well-behaved plant having fluorescent winter stem colour. Other winter interest plants include the purple-berried beauty berry and the pink-berried form of the snowberry, Marlene.
Perhaps one of the most interesting plants we can grow here is the witch hazel. I like a variety called Dianne. It has mid-winter flowers, red and yellow, and a compact form with a nice branching habit, leaves reminiscent of a hazelnut and awesome fall colour. Harry Lauder’s walking stick is a contorted hazelnut growing to about six feet tall in both sun or shade. There is a lot of seasonal interest here. Another exciting shrub for winter is the yucca in green or a variegated leaf. The spiky texture of its leaves makes it a real standout, almost tropical in look.
Regardless of the forms of the shrubs that you choose they will certainly accent the main structure of your garden. It is the perfect time of year to take a few pictures of your garden and think about what you would like to do with it in the spring.
Evan Davies owns Beltane Nursery at 2915 Highway 3 in Erickson.