A winter palette…
In parts of the world where winter denies us the sculptural beauty of ice and snow it grants us another kind of outdoor pleasure that can be cultivated into a rewarding winter experience: winter gardening. Here in the green and blue wet winter a temperate climate permits certain plants to showcase their particular splendor and in a few cases even bloom. I live in a city famous for gardens, and many of them dedicate specific attention to winter gardening, with one allotting a massive area exclusively as a winter garden.
Unlike spring and summer, winter gardens do not burst with color ranging across the spectrum and set against ample green foliage. Instead they are composed of deep and silvered or bluish greens, bright greens, dark to light near-pink purples, highlights and spots of red, and white. The background for this winter palette is earthen browns and blacks of tree trunks and branches and patches of exposed or leaf strewn garden beds. Should you wish to create with a winter garden palette, I offer you my color selections.
A winter garden tour…
In the best winter gardens I’ve visited evergreens emerge as features rather than as extras. No longer overshadowed by the abundant leaves of the deciduous shrubs and trees, nor by eye-catching flowers, the multitude of evergreens that have been standing patiently at the sides, in the middle, and at the back cut lines and angles and edges into the sky and shimmer their luscious green regally in the sun. This is what makes them so fabulous for Christmas decorations and light displays. Evergreens by their nature are structural and stand up a wall of color waiting to be accented.
Other smaller green plants offer attractive highlights in both form and color. The standouts are ferns, moss, heather, and grasses that remain rather than die back after the frost. Like the evergreens, these little scrubby and ground covering plants get their due during winter months when they can at last be seen. Moss is a special wonder that seems to glow in overcast, frosty, and foggy weather. It’s a widely variable species of green fuzziness, compact density, or near leaf-like fronds. Whether they emit some kind of spectral light or not I can’t be sure, but they visually transport me into some in-between fairy realm I’m reluctant to every return from. Heather too occupies a special place of fantasy in my mind. I recall those stories of childhood, which often were set in some proxy for the English or Scottish or Welsh or some other UK countryside containing hills and moors with coverings of heather. Though I’ve never literally felt it, I have often imagined the springy heather beneath my feet as a relief after rougher roads, and I have lain down for a long awaited healing slumber on a mattress filled with heather. In winter, heather is not only boasting multiple shades of lovely green, but it blooms pod-like tiny bulb flowers in purples, pinks, and whites. Whether covering rolling hills, bunched in a flower bed, or filling a winter combination pot, heather warms the winter with a low growing lavender thrill sparking out from the green.
A remarkable few other winter flowering plants add contrast and points of colorful interest to winter gardens. Hellebore most notably can be found for sale outside supermarkets in January. It springs a lovely large flower right after Christmas with similar shades to heather but often with a blended gradient or a few different tones. Its dark green foliage frames the bloom beautifully and provides interest in gardens and containers long after flowering has finished. The flowers however are long lasting and pleasantly scented. Even brighter than hellebore are the cyclamen which sprout bright pink and purple flowers that look like a cluster of butterflies stretching their wings. They are a small but mighty bit of winter color. For a little red accent, shrubs and ground covers that display their berries in the winter complement the ornamentation of a winter garden with even brighter colorful contrast to the dominant browns, greens, and blues. And what is a winter garden without snowdrops. These eager blubs are so ready for winter that I feel they are somehow might plant kingdom cousins. Me too, snowdrops, I love the winter too. Their sturdy mild green stocks poke through the soil right at the beginning of winter and grow fast, thick, and strong culminating in a rounded white head of a blossom. Like the hellebore, snowdrops are sweetly scented like the smell of a florist shop.
I love these little touches of plants in winter. The fragrances, the bits of color, the attention placed on the often quiet and hidden things. When everything else has receded what’s left has a fortitude and peaceful strength that brightens my life even in the dark.
Here are a few highlights from my balcony winter garden.
Rosemary is a beautiful plant by itself, but amazingly it flowers during the winter season in little periwinkle blooms which attract humming birds to by balcony daily.
Hellebore is winter’s beauty queen.
Heather is a great addition to mixed containers. My heather blooms a light pink color, but it has already finished blooming this year at the beginning of January.
Redwood Creeping Wintergreen is a ground cover with lovely dangling red berries that last through the duration of winter. I also like this plant in mixed containers.
Cyclamen. What more needs to be said. This plant speaks for itself.
Snowdrops and Moss make for a great combination pot. I put this one together yesterday.
Evergreens bring me peace and joy year round.
A mystery plant: maybe Perennial Salvia – Galeana Red Sage or Calamint? I purchased this plant in the fall for some fall color and it has continued to bloom this winter. I think it’s probably of the sage varieties based on its broad leaves, but I’m not certain I have identified it correctly.
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