Flowers and Structure in Your Garden for Winter

Winter is an ideal time to ensure you have some specific winter flowering plants to add colour and brightness to your day. It is also important to have evergreen trees and shrubs to give form and structure.

With any form of garden style it is always best to have a variety of plants throughout the year that will give you colour or interest in all the seasons.

Winter in the garden is a time when you can really see the garden in its barest bones. If you have a more cottage style garden with lots of flowering herbaceous perennials you will find the garden quite bare in the winter months. I noticed this in our home garden last winter. Through the warmer months our garden resembled a tropical jungle however in the depths of winter all of the pretty perennials had died back or had been cut back ready for their spring flush.

We have a row of citrus trees and avocadoes that are all evergreen but the back drop of the garden was gone and all of the under storey plantings, were well and truly asleep underground. I decided we needed to add some evergreen shape and structure to the beds so that we could still have a lushness to the garden even when the rest of the plants were dormant.

You can achieve evergreen shape and form in your garden through winter by adding a block planting of either a single shrub or groupings of the one shrub amongst your herbaceous perennials or even a hedge as a border or a back drop.

If you would like a full list of evergreen shrubs for your winter garden you can send me an email and I will forward my recommended list for the Hilltops region. glenice@glenicebuckdesigns.com.au

• Topics:

• Gardening