In times gone by the deepest darkest months of Winter were seen by gardeners as fit only for leafing through catalogues of seeds, preferably by some form of open fire, whilst green fingered urges were met by watering the house plants and admiring seasonal indoor plants. These days, though, most folks want their gardens to deliver for them all year round, and whole plots and entire books are devoted to groups of garden plants that are at their prime in January and February.
Hamamelis - Witch hazel flowers open even when encrusted with ice and snow.
You certainly don’t have to go as far as dedicating all of your growing space to a single season to reap the rewards of winter gardening. There’s definitely a special kind of satisfaction that comes from seeing a blazing red Witch Hazel bursting improbably through snow and ice, or from having the heady perfume of a Viburnum waft gently through the air. What’s more, the addition of a few select seasonal gems into a garden will encourage you off the Christmas sofa to get out and about to investigate their progress.
There aren’t too many pollinating insects around in January so a common feature of lots of winter flowering shrubs is small flowers with a powerful perfume to entice those bees brave enough to take to the wing. Low-growing Sarcococca (Christmas Box) is so non-descript in flower you might well tread on it were it not for the knock-your-socks-off fragrance that demands your attention. Lonicera x purpusii ‘Winter Beauty’ is a popular shrubby Honeysuckle with small white flowers that also pack a powerful scent and is pretty much foolproof to grow in almost any situation.
Chimonanthus praecox - a sublime gem for the winter garden.
With it’s pretty lantern-like hanging flowers of primrose and burgundy the medium-sized shrubby Magnolia relative Chimonanthus praecox (Wintersweet) is rather more sophisticated and also provides a delicious perfume. Although it’s not often seen outside of big gardens it’s readily available and should be grown far more often than it is.
The image of Mahonias has become a bit tarnished lately, mainly due to their use in virtually every municipal park planting throughout the northern hemisphere. Still, there’s a good reason why they are so widely grown – dramatic, large, spiky, evergreen foliage, a tolerance for shade and the production of large racemes of very fragrant, canary-yellow flowers in Winter. In many ways these are the perfect shrubs for town gardens. Viburnums are almost as popular, and the best of the winter flowering varieties, such as V. farreri, and V.x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ never fail to please with their clusters of pinky-white fragrant flowers.
If you have a wall that you’d like to see come alive in winter then Clematis cirrhosa is probably the number one choice. This moderately strong climber has delicate, fern-like evergreen foliage and really pretty, cream-coloured bell-shaped flowers that have a delicate scent. A number of forms are widely available, I particularly like ‘Freckles’ which has petals splashed with crimson on their inner surface.
Daphne mezereum - one of the finest native wild flowers for fragrance.
One of our more unusual wild flowers, Daphne mezereum is a British that thrives on chalky soils. This is one small shrub that delivers big time in winter with beautiful flowers of purple or pure white that have the most intoxicating fragrance.
Possibly my personal favourite winter shrub of all though is a Daphne relative from China – Edgeworthia chrysantha, the Paper Bush. The flexible bark of this beauty was traditionally made into bank notes, but unless you’re planning your own small-scale printing operation, you, like me, will be more drawn to the tubular, fragrant flowers of pale yellow. The form ‘Red Dragon’, if you can find it, is even more beautiful with impossibly exotic bright red flowers that, on a sunny winters day (and possibly depending on what you’ve been drinking the night before) might just convince you that you’re in the Caribbean.
Hamamelis (Witch Hazels) are firm favourites that can be found in most larger gardens. The old hybrid ‘Pallida’ is still hard to beat on the scent front, but there are a range of new-ish hybrids arriving from breeders in Belgium that deliver much larger flowers with the same awesome perfume. Colours vary from pale yellow through copper orange to blood red. ‘Nina’ is the finest of all the yellows and I particularly love the dramatic, large burnt orange flowers of recently introduced ‘Aurora’ and ‘Aphrodite.’
All of these shrubs work hard to drive away the winter cold and also serve as handy a reminder that Spring is just around the corner, but some trees are also at their best at this time of year. Birches can be rather understated small trees for much of the year but the best of them really come alive in winter. Then, with the leaves long since disappeared, the colours and textures of their often-fabulous bark are fully revealed. I’ve become a huge fan of Betula albosinensis, in particular, and seeing the low winter sun illuminate the peeling deep scarlet and bright pinky-orange bark of the many different forms is without doubt the highlight of my own garden in winter.
Betula albosinensis - a great centrepiece for any winter garden.
Of course none of these winter wonders should be planted in winter itself, but by checking out what’s looking good now it’s easy to plan ahead for a Spring planting. Unless your soil is truly dismal, then the best advice for planting all trees and large shrubs is simple: the only garden supplies you need are a spade, a fork, a short sturdy stake + tie, if your plant is tall or top heavy, and a willing digger-of the-soil…that would be you or a trusty assistant.
All of your planting time and efforts should be focussed on making a wide planting hole and breaking all of the soil into small, crumbly pieces, this way your new plantings will be able to get their roots out into the soil easily and will establish quickly. DO NOT add compost into the hole, this damages the natural bacterial balance and can easily lead to root rot, as well as slowing down the progress of the plant into the soil where it will, after all, be spending the rest of it’s life. Instead mulch well on top of the planting, but don’t cover the stem of the plant, and the worms will do the rest.
Tags: Flowers, Garden, Garden Supplies, Houseplants, Indoor plants, Seeds, Watering, Wild Flowers, Winter Gardening
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