In December, when the ground is frozen and the trees are bare, any green plant still standing seems heroic. That’s one reason Suzy Bales thinks winter is the most honest of the seasons.
“Although a lone flower blooming in a snowy bed gives my heart a jolt, it’s the complementary combinations of plants that make a winter landscape endearing,” she writes in her new book, “The Garden in Winter: Plant for Beauty and Interest in the Quiet Season.”
“Ironically, winter is when we need color the most, but it is the season least planned and planted for color.”
Bales, a contributing editor for Better Homes & Gardens magazine, wrote her book to help other gardeners learn to create a beautiful landscape even in the dead of winter.
“I love a great snow cover, but there were years I’d walk past the garden on my way to the car and it never occurred to me to walk around the garden just to look at plants,” she says.
Now she makes time to walk around the gardens at her Long Island home and just observe.”I find crazy things, like a bird’s nest built close to the ground in a shrub rose or a wasp’s nest attached to the rim of a huge pot of annuals,” she says. “I wouldn’t notice those details unless I purposely went out there to see what’s going on.”
Take photos
To make the most of the season, Bales encourages gardeners to plan ahead for winter beauty. The first step is to get outside and take pictures of the landscape in fall and winter. Photos taken with leafless trees and shrubs help show what’s structurally missing from the landscape.
Bales also recommends taking a critical look out each window in the house and thinking of ways to improve the view.
Consider adding structures that provide a strong vertical impact like arbors, lattices, arches and detailed fences and pillars, she suggests. Garden ornaments, like benches, birdbaths or sundials also add form and structure.
Because empty planters add to the empty feeling of winter, Bales suggests creating arrangements with evergreen branches and broadleaf evergreens in any metal, wood or fiberglass container. Arrangements can be made by taking three different textures and three different colors of greens and placing them in moist soil.
“We see these arrangements in front of retail shops or at botanic gardens, but we forget we can do this at our homes too,” she says. Her book includes spectacular winter displays arranged in urns, metal window boxes and even hanging baskets.
“Most people think a hanging basket is only for summer, but it’s easy to fill a basket with evergreens and hang it by the front door.” She says to poke pines and greens into the soil and drape them over the sides of the container. If the soil is frozen, Bales says to use hot water to help defrost it. The greens will need to be watered once every week or two.
Of course Bales also recommends adding plants to the landscape that can be enjoyed during every season. She suggests planning next winter’s garden by paying attention to this year’s landscape.
One of her favorite ways to warm up the winter garden is by adding plants with gold foliage, like gold conifers that come in many shapes and sizes, or those that are variegated green with gold.
Add the “Midas touch”
“There are so many dull days in winter, especially when there’s no snow cover. But when you look out the window and see gold on the ground, it’s like the Midas touch,” she says.
Bales favors Oriental spruce “Skyland” (Picea orientalis Skyland) in an island planting and the golden form of Juni- perus chinensis as a specimen plant. She says to use gold sparingly, but it works well to draw attention to a garden feature or to light up a dark area.
Another advantage of having an abundant winter garden is being able to decorate for the holidays by fashioning wreaths, swags and other decorations using evergreens, dried flowers, pinecones and seedpods collected from the yard.
Bales admits she goes crazy with Christmas decorating and uses whatever she finds in the garden. She fills vases with bare, curly willow branches, crafts stars made with Baby’s Breath and drapes one side of her fireplace mantel with a shawl of noble fir branches that reaches to the floor.
“I love being able to have a variety of things in the garden that I can’t buy in the garden shops,” she says. “Everything in the garden should be enjoyed and a little goes a long way. Because these little touches aren’t expected they can cause a big sensation.”
