You can make things really exciting with scented shrubs which flower in winter. They're not all evergreen but to have fragrance at this time of year is something special.
Perennial plants can be left all winter to enjoy their architectural stems or seed heads, and these can look good in frost too. It also helps all kinds of wildlife survive the winter.
Love your garden in winter, with frosty evergreens
But without evergreens things can still end up looking a bit brown and bland, with little more than bare stems to look at for a while (beautiful though they might be). Evergreens provide some green lushness when other plants are nothing put bare stems or stubby crowns at ground level. They can provide some structure and height, revealing different shapes to those that can be seen in summer when everything is growing strongly around them. And any architectural stems or seedheads will look even better set against an underlying structure of solid shapes and enduring colour. This will give your garden a sense of balance as these different elements compliment each other.
As a bonus, when things turn cold and frosty, as they did here this week, you can enjoy the effect this has on the hardy evergreens. They give the frost something to cling to, offering a fascinating silver grey glaze, and on closer inspection, a beautiful display of crystals hanging on to their leaves. Here are six that have been doing just that in my garden in the past week.
Pieris
The title picture is of a Pieris japonica "Forest Flame". It's long slender leaves looked beautiful covered in ice.A Lawn
The humble grass lawn is often overlooked. Potentially labour intensive but also a potentially stunning feature in a garden. Neglected in winter when it's too wet to mow, we can nonetheless enjoy it's transformation from muddy or sodden and featureless to a ghostly white haze.
Box hedge
It doesn't have to be a hedge. Buxus sempervirens can be clipped to any shape you like, be it a ball, dome, cone, pyramid or whatever you prefer. Whatever shape that is, it adds definition to any garden design, particularly at this time of year. And the lines it traces will be turned a silvery white on a cold morning, giving it another dimension.
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| Buxus sempervirens |
Hebe sutherlandii
Hebe's in general are useful evergreens. They make good sized shrubs for a border and their flowers attract bees. Some, like this Hebe sutherlandii can also be clipped quite neatly and make a good substitute for box if the dreaded blight has reached your garden. But the small leaves also hold the frost very nicely.
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| Hebe sutherlandii |
Ilex crenata
Ilex crenata is a very small leaved holly that can also be clipped and used instead of box, though it doesn't suit very geometric styles in my view. It adapts better to softer, fuzzier balls or domes, but it always appears very solid and robust. It doesn't seem to develop any of the little gaps that box does sometimes, it seems to grow very thickly. I love the way the tiny leaves attract the tiny ice crystals around their edges, like iron filings, if conditions are right.
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| Ilex crenata |
Thuja occidentalis
Thuja occidentalis "Teddy" is a dwarf conifer that I've more or less shaped into a ball, growing with several other clipped evergreens in a section of my garden. It can't be clipped too tightly I've found, because it has a tendency to put on fluffy new growth that detracts from the intended shape. But these fluffy bits do hold the frost very delicately and are worth venturing out in the cold for a closer look.
