When it's cold and dark outside throughout most of the landscape, it doesn't have to be so in your own garden. Winter is the time when many people flee from their gardens and retreat to the warmth of their living room fire, but with some bursts of colour, your winter garden can also be a place where you spend pleasant hours. With so many flowering plants reaching their most colourful moments in the spring and in the summer, which are some of the ways that you can inject colour into a winter garden?
Berry plants. While there are many berry producing plants that offer their fruits in the summertime, you can definitely find berries that continue throughout the winter time as they offer their wares to birds throughout the colder months of the years.
Holly plants produce vibrant red berries, and as you have probably seen them adorn the fronts of Christmas cards, it should come as no surprise that the holly plant thrives in winter, as does its red berries. Crabapple trees also offer their fruits in the wintertime—their stark branches giving way to plump red fruit, which can be a beautiful injection of colour in the winter months.
Evergreen plants. Not all trees and all shrubs shed all of their foliage throughout the year, and your garden landscape doesn't have to be a bleak vista of grey branches and twigs. In fact, your garden can be populated with a whole variety of greens and yellows if you head to your local garden centre and shop for some evergreens.
Some evergreens will even produce flowers so you can have some blooming life in your garden when it is cold. The Sarcococca Confusa plant for example can be a great choice. It's a small green oriental shrub, which produces beautifully delicate white buds that release a powerful scent even when it is cold.
Hardscaping. Of course, you are not limited to injecting colour to your garden through plants and shrubbery. You should also think about the ways that you can change or add to the hardscaping of your garden.
Perhaps you have a grey pergola that you could paint a more vivid colour throughout the winter months. Or maybe you could head to local landscaping supplies stores like SoilWorx to check out the variety of ornamentation and garden sculptures they have as an alternative route to adding colour to your outdoor space. Either way, you can find ways to spruce up the space you already have during the winter season.
Share18 February 2015
My yard is in the shade of both of my neighbour's homes for most of the day which makes it quite hard to grow some of my favourite plants. Even though the yard is shady I still want it to have some nice look ground cover and be a cool place to entertain people. I have used a combination of shade resistant plants and pavers to create a lovely space that is good for entertaining all year round. This blog has some tips on creating a pleasant atmosphere in your shady backyard, particularly if you have a yard that is too shady to grow many kinds of plants.