More Winter Interest
This time of year there are lots of blog posts about having multi-season interest, and especially Winter interest, in your garden. I love THIS from The Gardener’s Eden. Beautiful colour, strong contrast, everything you could want to take your mind off the bone shattering cold.
Or from Monrovia’s Top 7 Garden Trends for 2019: subtlety, wistfulness, peace.
Unfortunately, most of these beautiful scenes depend on sun, snow, or both to really show the virtues.
Unlike the torrential rains, winds and gloom that is the usual lot for us in coastal BC, or coastal PNW (this past week notwithstanding…).
So here we need to look for plants (or structures or art pieces) that can hold their own not only in the absence of glistening snow and soft winter-low sun, but in the presence of that pounding rain. The flowers of the Pennisetum (above in the Monrovia image) wouldn’t have maintained that lovely mounded shape through the deluge over the first couple days of 2019, but other grasses, like Carex ‘Frosted Curls’ (one of my all-time faves) can still give you the mounded shape, the potential for this frosted effect (real frost) when it happens, without the risk of total loss.
Carex ‘Frosted Curls’–actually frosted.
So assuming you don’t have the acres that for example Anglesey Abbey in Cambridge has…
Cornus stems and Rubus cockburnianus provide interest in the winter months. Credit: Jason Ingram The English Garden
…and that you don’t have California warmth and New England sun, here are my best tips for winter interest: berries and gold foliage.
Berries
Clockwise from top left: Pyracantha ‘Flava’; Callicarpa bodinieri ‘Profusion’; Skimmia japonica
The Pyracantha and Skimmia will glow in pretty much any location, partly because they have evergreen foliage to frame the berries. The Callicarpa however is deciduous, and really needs some other evergreen colour to set off even these neon purple berries. The above pic was taken in late Autumn, when the grasses were still vivid. They aren’t now, so be sure to plant something else around your Callicarpa that will still be present at this time of year. Which leads to the next category of winter interest for dour dreary coastal BC:
Gold Foliage
Chamaecyparis obtusa ‘Fernspray Gold’; Choisya ternata ‘Goldfingers’; Acorus gramineus ‘Ogon’
One of the great things about gold foliage is that it serves equally well as background colour and foreground colour.
Hamamelis ‘Diane’ in foreground, Chamaecyparis ‘Fernspray gold’ in the background
Had to borrow this picture of Euonymus japonica ‘Aureomarginata’ since my own has been badly eaten by root weevils.
Honourable Mentions
Everyone should have some creeping sedums in their garden.
Sedum rupestre ‘Angelina’ and Sedum spurium ‘Fuldaglut’–both put on extra layers of colour when it gets cold.
