The Garden Life: Winter a perfect time to picture your garden’s future

There are several times each year when a gardener needs to envision the garden in a completely different season. In autumn, we imagine the arrival of spring bulbs and plant them in the garden according to that vision. In spring, we speculate on summer flowers. Winter is a good time to imagine what your garden will look like in other seasons and also a full year from now. It’s best to keep track of these ideas with a plan.

Begin by drawing a simple outline of your entire garden or of individual areas in your garden. Make your drawing as accurate as possible, but simple enough that you will follow through with the project. Before you start filling in the outline with plants or hardscaping ideas, make a few copies. This way you won’t have to redraw the entire plan every time you add or remove garden elements or if you just want to fiddle around with an idea that comes up while it’s fresh in your mind.

Pull these plans out of storage every once in a while to review your garden in different seasons. Make a note of voids in winter and color clashes in spring and summer. Use your planning pages to add notes throughout the year unless you keep a separate garden journal. I like to use plant catalogs to help me list the plants that would transition well from one season to the next. Choose a combination of plants with colors that will blend even as they change with the seasons.

When we start gardening, we plan and plant for tomorrow or at most, the near future. That’s why so many beginning gardens are filled with spring flowers only. Exuberance is an appropriate approach for beginning any project. Over time, we may mellow out in pace with our maturing gardens. Whatever stage you’re in, it’s the desire to take your ideas one step further that characterizes the whole-hearted gardener.

Selecting rhododendrons

Rhododendron is a genus of more than 500 species of evergreen and deciduous trees and shrubs. They vary greatly in habit and may reach a height of 80 feet or creep at ground level to form 1-foot, prostrate shrubs. This information gives us 500 reasons not to buy and plant the first shrub you see at the grocery store checkout counter. Broadleaf evergreens can be treated as a single specimen plant and look best if pruned only to encourage the natural shape of the plant, a shape that shows off the plant’s natural attributes. If planting more than one, plant in odd-numbered groupings.

Rhododendrons are grown mainly for their flowers, which are born in terminal racemes, known as trusses. Individual flowers differ greatly in size and shape and even in fragrance. There are thousands of hybrids, encompassing nearly every flower color. Some plants have attractive young growth, ranging in color from red to bronze-brown or metallic blue-green. A few have decorative, exfoliating bark, which may be any color from brownish pink or deep maroon to silver-gray. As always, the ultimate choice is up to you and your individual criteria.

A couple of my favorites include the classic Rhododendron PJM and Ken Janeck. PJM is a known performer in the Southwest Washington garden. This compact evergreen shrub has small, oval-shaped, dark green leaves that turn a brownish purple in winter, especially if grown in full sun. The trusses of bright lavender-pink flowers are borne early in the season. I can always count on PJM to lift my mood to new spring heights. R. yakushimanum Ken Janeck is another reliable, low-growing shrub with full trusses of funnel-shaped white flowers lined with pinkish purple and spotted with green.

Vegetable for a winter garden

Another mood lifter is the Brussels sprout.

The first time I planted Brussels sprouts, I was surprised by their garden vigor. They grow straight and tall, with an organically architectural structure, as if Gaudi designed a garden vegetable. Their color is like no other plant in the garden, a marbled bluish-green with a dusky matte finish. Harvest individual sprouts from the bottom up, before the lower leaves yellow.

I planted that first batch as a late-season crop that came to maturity just as winter set in and the first snow of the winter season fell. The emerging sprouts were oddly remarkable, perfect little cabbages swelling out of thick, upright stalks, with each plump bud wearing a cap of fresh snow. Frost or a light snowfall improves their flavor. Fresh Brussels sprouts are delicious in hearty winter soups and stews. That’s just one more reason to grow them in your winter garden.

Robb Rosser is a WSU-certified Master Gardener. Reach him at Write2Robb@aol.com.