Winter Brings Stark Beauty To Your Yard
All right. Let’s be honest. We gardeners are a curious lot. It takes only a few days of 40-degree temperatures and a little sunshine to send us peeking under winter blankets of leaves and needles, hoping to find any sign of new life. If I didn’t know working in wet soil could damage it, I’d be out there weeding.
But with all this anticipation of spring, we are still well aware we are in the depths of winter - a mild winter, but still winter. So for now, we’ll have to be content with the austere beauty of our winter landscapes.
The subtle interest and beauty of the winter garden has always amazed me. Though it doesn’t possess the bright colors, smells and sounds of a summer garden, it does offer its own wonders. Winter gardens have a tendency to enhance shapes. Flower beds, tree trunks, branches, stems and twigs are more defined.
The thick foliage of evergreens can give the appearance of rolling mounds or upright towers. They embrace the wispy, barren stems of deciduous shrubs and trees. Dotted in beds about the garden, they create a sense of depth. Though they are referred to as evergreens, they are far from just being green. They flow through our landscapes with coats of forest green, blue-green, yellowgreen, purple-green, gray-green, gray-blue, and blue.
Some even change color for the winter months. The Youngstown juniper changes from green to purple-green while the gold thread cypress turns from green to a rich golden brown. (No, it’s not dead.) One plant even coats itself in specks of white. The bristlecone pine produces white sticky resin drops that sit upon its needles. The resin is an interesting year-round feature of the pine, but this winter the resin is so thick it gives the trees the appearance of being flocked.
Though evergreens provide our winter gardens with strong color and background, they change very little from one season to the other. It’s the deciduous plants (those that loose their leaves) that are sometimes the most fascinating. When their branches and buds are looked at closely, we realize they are a symphony of intrigue.
Fuzzy, tan seed pods hang in dramatic contrast from the black, twisted branches of the contorted filbert. Swollen bundles of short buds cling to the bronze branches of the forsythia, giving the appearance of a worn hairbrush. The bright red and yellow twigs of the redtwig and yellowtwig dogwoods compete with the evergreens for the winter color award. And whether we like the appearance or not, the stately pin oak holds on to its rich mahogany leaves until they’re dislodged by new leaves in the spring.
Even wrinkled up, unharvested fruit adds character to our winter display. Golden quince hang precariously from branches laden with thorns. Strings of shriveled black currents dangle from the nondescript branches of the red current bush. The only remaining berries that haven’t been pirated by the birds are the orange and red berries of the mountain ash, the bright red berries of the barberries, and the crimson berries of the cotoneasters. By winter’s end, they, too, will be gone.
Popping up through shallow mounds of winter mulch are the bright green leaves of foxglove, canterbury bells, primrose, and daisies. None of them are actively growing, they’re just sitting there, oblivious to the winter weather, waiting for the ground to warm their feet. Nestled in among the soft gray of the dusty miller, are the helleborus (Christmas and Lenten rose). If this mild weather continues, we may see early blooms from these fellows.
Our winter landscapes endure a very long season. With a few choice plants, even the bleakest of days can be silhouetted with interest and beauty. We just have to look closer.
xxxx