Christmas Gardening – winter garden care

The first rule of maintaining a well-kept garden in winter is to ensure you have good structure, like the perfect bones that make a woman beautiful at twenty or seventy, good structure gives your garden style and interest at every point of the year. This means shape, colour and design are essential to provide interest through the winter months. In traditional gardens structure is provided by walls, paths, statuary and hedges and in more contemporary gardens, decking and lighting produce the same effect.

Colour does prove quite hard to achieve throughout the winter season, not least because our temperate climate offers more low grey skies than icy blue ones, which means colour is leached out of whatever planting we do achieve. However, you can always add small bright elements, like decorations on a Christmas tree, by using light and gleaming plants such as the silver birch (Betula) with hellebores planted beneath for winter flowers or colourful dogwoods (Cornus) with bright yellow or red stems that catch all the weak winter sunlight and grow well with winter flowering heather nearby for contrast.

Evergreens are also a winter essential as their texture and shape will brighten up your garden when all else is bare. Shrubs such as Skimmia japonica and Viburnum tinus are amongst the best to invest in at this time of year and a personal favourite is the highly scented flowers of Viburnum x bodnantense, which will break into bloom at the first hint of milder weather.

If you have a pond, you need to pay particular attention to your aquatic plants over the winter season as they are likely to be killed at the first sign of frost. You may want to put a few plants in your greenhouse during the colder months for extra protection. Because your pond needs protection too, think about which plants can be left tall, like ornamental grasses, to offer some shelter to the pond margins.

Christmas gardening frost photograph by a2gemma, used under a creative commons attribution licence