Winter is the longest single season in this valley and it is the one most plantings have nothing to say about. Five months of bare sticks and frozen ground, viewed mostly from inside a warm house through a window.
Which is a strange thing to design around last, and it is the cheapest gap to fill. Winter interest comes in four forms and most of them cost nothing extra:
- Bark and stems. Red-twig dogwood against snow, peeling birch or amur maple, the dark structure of a well-shaped tree.
- Persistent fruit. Berries that hold through January rather than dropping in October — crabapple, sumac, coralberry, rose hips.
- Seed heads and standing grasses. Left up rather than cut down, they catch snow and move in wind, which is the only motion in the yard for months.
- Evergreen mass. The shape that stays when everything else is outline.
The one rule is placement. Winter interest has to be where it is actually seen — the view from the kitchen or the living room, and the walk from the car to the door. Nobody is strolling the back of the property in January, and a beautiful red-twig dogwood behind the garage is a beautiful plant nobody looks at.
And it has to survive the fall cleanup. Most of what makes a winter garden is the stuff a thorough autumn tidy removes.
