Planning for winter interest

‘Arctic Fire’ is a shrubby dogwood with colorful stems. — Proven Winners

Some people get the winter blues, but for gardeners, it’s the winter grays and browns — the leaden skies and lifeless landscapes — that really bring on a sense of desolation.

Spend the cold-weather months looking out on nothing more than a sea of dormant grass or a few straggly evergreens, and you succumb to the temptation to draw the drapes on the ugliness, hunker down on the sofa and wait for spring.

The garden doesn’t have to be quite so bleak between the blaze of autumn color and the first daffodil. True, winter’s palette is more austere and the range of flowering plants rather limited. But winter isn’t without its own quiet beauty, especially if you plan for it.

The subtle contrast of colors among evergreens can be infinitely pleasing and the intricate structure of bare winter branches stand revealed as natural architecture. Colorful bark takes on an importance that goes unnoticed during the showier seasons. If you’re lucky, fallen leaves may reveal distant views hidden once the trees leaf out.

It may seem a bit backward to begin your garden planning with an emphasis on the off-season, but what’s really at issue is the selection of plants rewarding through much of the year. But first, take the advice of garden designers and consider the overall structure of your garden.

When the leaves fall and the perennials die away, there should remain a framework of evergreen and deciduous plants to define its basic shape and contours. Together with permanent elements like fences, arbors, walls and walkways, this is what designers refer to as the "bones" of the garden, the skeleton on which the more ephemeral attractions hang.

Evergreens are important for mass — and their persistent green is important. But evergreens are not just green. The familiar blue of the blue Colorado spruce can also be found in smaller specimens like Picea pungens ‘Fat Albert’ or ‘R.H. Montgomery’. Compact forms of the golden oriental spruce, like Picea orientalis ‘Aurea Compacta’, offer a handsome bonus of light gold growth. Evergreen ground covers, including Siberian carpet cypress, Microbiata decussata, deepen to a purplish burgundy in winter.

Berries and variegated holly add color. — zoer/Creative Commons

The broadleaf evergreens offer another palette of color, texture and shape. Rhododendrons and azaleas are in wide use, but the choices don’t end there. Hollies come in shades of blue and in variegated forms edged in yellow or white; sun-splashed Japanese pieris (Pieris japonica ‘Variegata’) can brighten a border. Aim for variety in leaf forms and sizes.

Two other evergreens are worth seeking out in areas where deer are a problem. Boxwoods developed in Canada, the Sheridan hybrids, combine the virtues of English and Korean varieties with excellent hardiness and good leaf color through the winter. Look for the varieties known as ‘Green Mountain,’ ‘Green Mound’ and ‘Green Velvet’. The plum yew, Cephalotaxus harringtonia, looks a lot like the familiar spreading yew, but with larger needles — and is unpalatable to deer.

An unbroken vista of evergreens, useful as they are, can be too much of a good thing. The ideal border has a mix of evergreen and deciduous plants, with the latter providing transparent silhouettes and a tracery of branches.

Some small trees, notably the cutleaf Japanese maples, present a cascading mound of finely divided branches. Flowering dogwoods have an intriguing horizontal branch habit. And weeping trees, including the modestly-scaled weeping pears and cherries, look particularly beautiful with a coating of snow.

Berries in orange, red and gold are conspicuous in the late-fall garden, but probably won’t persist through the winter where hungry birds are abundant. Colorful bark, on the other hand, has impact throughout the long winter.

The smooth, shiny mahogany of cherry bark and the pale gleam of white birch are two familiar examples of eye-catching bark. Consider, too, the peeling cinnamon of the paperbark maple (Acer griseum), the intricate patterns of the snake bark maples and the mottled tan, green and salmon of the Stewartia pseudocamellia, an outstanding small tree with a second bounty of white spring flowers.

The smaller, bright-stemmed dogwoods are other favorites. Cornus stolonifera or sericea have red and yellow stems. Pruning hard in early spring is the key, since only the younger growth has color.

Hellebores like ‘Painted Doubles’ bloom in late winter. — Terra Nova Nurseries

Don’t forget the winter effects of ornamental grasses. A cascade of golden stems topped by fluffy plumes shows well against a background of dark evergreens. Although bamboo isn’t for everyone, there are slow-spreading forms that are relatively easy to contain — and the temperate species hardy in New Jersey are evergreen.

You might not think that winter and flowers go together, but there’s a surprising number of hardy blossoms to draw you outdoors on the bleakest day. Among these, the hellebores probably reign supreme, for stamina and eye-pleasing color.

Witch hazels are small trees that produce odd, spidery flowers, happily frost-proof, in shades that range from palest yellow through orange and bronze. Long before the common forsythia blooms, the so-called white forsythia, Abeliophyllum distichum, puts on its show, and two forms of viburnum, V. tinus and V. x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ burst into fragrant flower.

Another sweet-smelling, if ephemeral, bloomer is the winter honeysuckle, Lonicera fragrantissima — not showy, but reliable. The grape hollies are smaller evergreen shrubs that present starbursts of yellow flowers in late winter and dusty blue berries in fall. Mahonia japonica creates a spreading thicket of handsome, glossy green leaves, while Mahonia bealei, its leather-leafed cousin, turns a pleasing shade of mahogany red in winter.

Tiny though they are, the precocious minor bulbs — snowdrops, winter aconites, Siberian squil and the early snow crocus — give pleasure disproportionate to their size. To come upon a brave bunch of snowdrops in early February is not just a surprise, but a humbling gift.

The trick in planning is not to just put in one plant here and there, but to put compatible plants together. A few ideas: Under a red-stem dogwood, the zingy chartreuse of Hellebore foetidus; beneath a white forsythia, pink and green hellebores, or yellow winter aconite and the early daffodil ‘February Gold’; a pale pink daphne underplanted with bronze carpet bugle (Ajuga reptans) and early crocus.

Even in winter, there are choices that give you a reason to treasure the garden. Or at least give you something to see out your frosty windows until spring in its lush beauty returns again.