Designing for winter

 

When choosing plants for a garden, it's important to choose those that look good together in all seasons. The most important, in cold winter areas at least, is not when the plants are blooming, but in the winter, when the plants remain relatively unchanged for months. If they don't look good in the winter, hat's a long continuous time for the garden to be in doldrums. I'm pretty happy with this combination of form, color and texture, which will hold up until growth starts in the spring and I cut down the previous year's growth. Flower color, which lasts only a few weeks for many perennials, shrubs and trees, is secondary, particularly since they may or may not overlap. That's not to say that flowers are not important. They are what give the garden sparkle and excitement during the growing season. They are, after all, what most people focus on the most in the garden, and orchestrating a succession of harmonious blooms throughout the growing season is a challenge that many of us struggle to obtain. But if only half of the year contains flowers, to get year-round enjoyment from the garden, one needs to spend a proportionate amount of time in considering the non-flowering times. I wouldn't say that half of the design energy needs to go to winter planning. The dormant season has less complexity to consider, as the forms and colors are stable and one doesn't need to account for the succession of blooms. But one does need to account for color, form, texture, size. It's too bad that catalogs and garden books don't usually show the winter color and form of the plants. They typically focus on peak appearance of the bloom and ignore the other 40-50 weeks of the year that the plant is in the garden. So the design of the winter garden must come from one's experience or observation of plant appearance in local gardens. Without that experience, one could, as I did, plant for growing season appearance, balancing bloom time, color, form, plant size, growing conditions, plant needs. Then when winter comes, make adjustments.