Winter garden ideas: 11 ways to keep colour in the cold
From November to March, most of us see the garden from the kitchen window. Here’s how to make that view lovely, with plants that save their best for the cold.
Rachel Hannah
Winter garden ideas usually start in the wrong place, with what to add. The better question is what you’ll see. From November to March, most of us look at the garden through a window far more than we walk in it, so the loveliest winter gardens are planned around that view.
A winter garden has its own quiet beauty: bare branches, low golden light, frost on the seedheads, and a handful of plants that flower and smell their best when nothing else does. Here are eleven ways to keep colour in the cold, with plants the RHS recommends.
11 winter garden ideas
1. Plan for the view from inside
Stand at the window you use most, often the kitchen or the living room, and put your best winter plants where you can see them from there. One beautiful thing in view is worth more than ten at the far end of the garden.
2. Plant stems that glow
Dogwoods, or cornus, are grown for their bare winter stems, in red, orange and lime. Planted where the low sun catches them, they look almost lit from inside. Cutting some of the oldest stems back in early spring keeps fresh, brightly coloured growth coming.
3. Choose a tree with beautiful bark
A white-stemmed birch is the classic choice. The RHS gives its Award of Garden Merit to Betula utilis var. jacquemontii ‘Grayswood Ghost’, whose white bark stands out even on dull days. For something warmer, the Tibetan cherry, Prunus serrula, has glossy, mahogany red bark that’s lovely to touch.
4. Put scent by the door
The RHS advises planting fragrant winter plants by the doors and paths you use every day, and it’s lovely advice. Sarcococca, also called sweet box or Christmas box, has tiny white flowers with a scent far bigger than they are, and daphnes give scent from Christmas to April.
5. Grow a witch hazel
Hamamelis has spidery, fragrant flowers in yellow or orange on bare branches, which the RHS lists from December to March. One by a path is enough to make a winter walk to the shed something to look forward to.
6. Add a winter flowering shrub
Mahonia × media ‘Charity’ has upright sprays of yellow flowers in November and December, and ‘Lionel Fortescue’, an RHS award winner, has scented ones. Both are happy in a shady corner.
7. Train a winter clematis
Clematis cirrhosa is evergreen, and covers a fence or trellis with cream, bell shaped flowers that the RHS lists from November to March. Give it a sheltered, sunny wall.
8. Underplant with hellebores and snowdrops
Hellebores and snowdrops bring flowers to the ground beneath shrubs and trees. The RHS gives the Christmas rose, Helleborus niger, from December to March, and snowdrops in January and February. Cyclamen coum and the little Iris reticulata follow on as winter turns to spring.
9. Leave the seedheads standing
Resist the urge to tidy everything in autumn. Grasses such as Miscanthus ‘Septemberrot’, another RHS award winner, stand all winter, and seedheads look beautiful touched with frost. The RHS also recommends leaving healthy, hollow stemmed plants until early spring, because insects shelter in them over winter.
10. Give the garden an evergreen frame
When the borders die back, evergreens hold the shape of the garden. A few clipped domes, a hedge, or a pair of evergreen shrubs either side of a bench give the eye somewhere to rest, and make the bare branches look intentional rather than empty.
11. Look after the birds
Birds bring life and movement to a winter garden. The RHS suggests feeding them regularly, with fat plus grain or nuts, and leaving a shallow dish of water at ground level. If a pond freezes, gently melt a hole in the ice rather than cracking it.
Light it softly
Winter evenings come early, and a little light lets you enjoy the garden from indoors. Keep it low and warm: a lantern on the table, a few warm white lights pointing down onto a path or a tree trunk. Less light, used well, looks calmer than floodlighting, and it’s gentler on wildlife too.
Winter gardens to visit for ideas
Seeing plants in winter is the best way to choose them. The Winter Walk at RHS Wisley in Surrey runs until the end of March. Cambridge University Botanic Garden opened its winter garden in 1979, and says it was the first UK botanic garden to set aside an area just for winter interest. And Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire, a National Trust garden, has a much loved winter garden and, the RHS notes, more than 500 varieties of snowdrop. Check opening times on each garden’s own website before you go.
If you’d like help with your garden
Garden, landscape and plant styling is coming soon at Sunday Ambience, designed online in the studio’s rustic luxury style. If you’d like to hear when it opens, you can register your interest there. And for colour right by the front door, there’s more in Winter pots for your front door: 9 plants to pot up now.
In the meantime, if a room inside needs some love, send me a few photographs and tell me what isn’t quite working. I design everything online, from your photos and measurements, I read every message myself, and there’s no obligation of any kind.