GardenDesignOnline

Plants for All Seasons

Wintersweet and More

One of my favorite winter activities is a weekend visit to the US National Arboretum in Washington DC.  It reminds you over and over again that plants don't really have to be in leaf or flower to have real presence in the landscape.  You could smell the fragrance of Chimonanthus praecox, shown here, from yards away, and the very pale yellow flowers were simply gorgeous against the clear blue sky.

I even admired the feathery structure of the bare Mock Orange and vowed to plant one at the house up in Massachusetts, where there's a lot more room.  This one, in the Arboretum's Asian Valley, had the added attraction of a well-structured bird's nest, which will disappear as soon as the leaves emerge.

We strolled through the hollies, always one of the winter wonders, and then ambled by the magnolia collection, punctuated here and there by brilliant red splashes of winterberry.  We admired the smooth grey bark on the deciduous magnolias and noticed that the sun shining down on the leaves of Magnolia virginiana gave them a silvery, almost ghost-like appearance.

Designing in Winter

You'd never guess from looking at the picture at left that this landscape is in desperate need of more plants. It's one reason designers should pay more attention to the winter landscape. 

When everything is in flower, you just don't notice anything else, and flaws in the garden design are overlooked. But when the leaves are off the trees and the shrubs, it gives you a chance to really study the structure of your garden.

The image at right is of the same part of the garden, taken from a slightly different angle.  Nevertheless, in winter you can easily see that you should a) ask the neighbors if you can plant a few shrubs in their yard behind the bench and b) plant an evergreen to the left of the bench, along with a little more groundcover.

The additional plants would "enclose" the bench a bit more, making the entire area almost a room unto itself in a very small space. From spring until fall, the Doublefile Viburnum provides the "roof."