Garden Centre

Thursday, November 29, 2007

The British winter garden is not a pretty sight

Winter shows a garden’s bones. When the flowers, and even the foliage, are gone, all that remains is the garden’s structure, its ‘hard surfaces’ as we’ve all learned to call them since we started watching garden makeover programmes, and the skeletons of the plants we’ve chosen.

I spend a lot of time peering at other people’s gardens right now, to see what looks good naked! Trees like these, with a complex shape (that almost amounts to texture) against the sky, are wonderful in winter. Grasses look good too, but so many gardens seem to be empty of any kind of interest through the winter. Bamboo makes a wonderful impression against a cold winter sky, peeling barked trees or those with beautiful outlines like all the weeping varieties look romantic, and those ‘hard structures’ if they have an intrinsic appeal (nicely textured brick or stone, interesting curves to paths etc) have their own charm too. So why do so many gardens look like a muddy field?

I put it down to a British love of order and lack of imagination. We tend to make things ‘neat and tidy’ rather than ‘interesting’ and that means that our natural inclination to economy, efficiency and orderliness is reveals when all the fluffy stuff that makes up a garden disappears. When the Virginia Creeper falls from the shed, the delphiniums no longer hide the fence and the plastic pond liner is no longer concealed by the spear-like leaves of the Iris, our hideous tendency to make things small, square and ugly is revealed in all its horrible reality.

winter trees photograph by Meda, used under a creative commons attribution licence

Labels: garden trees, hard surfaces, winter interest

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:44 AM

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