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The Garden Life: Closer look reveals winter garden’s splendors

By Robb Rosser
Published: January 7, 2015, 4:00pm
2 Photos
Robb Rosser
Dwarf conifers are the perfect garden accent, with four seasons of interest for every size of garden.
Robb Rosser Dwarf conifers are the perfect garden accent, with four seasons of interest for every size of garden. Photo Gallery

Sometimes in winter, I simply have to make myself stop and look before I can see what is right in front of me. We have such an abundance of evergreen plants in our landscape that we often take them for granted. We rush around with our heads held down and our eyes dulled over in a gray haze. I try to remind myself to stop for a moment and look around. When I do, I am always delighted by our Northwest winter plant palette.

Even on a dreary day in winter, the evergreen huckleberry will show off its lustrous, leathery, dark green leaves with red and bronze highlights. The inkberry holly has glossy, narrow dark green leaves with an abundance of blackberries through the winter. Once your interest is piqued, make it a point to notice all the distinct attributes that help a winter plant stand out at this time of year.

I encourage you to drop into your favorite spring- and summertime nursery at least once a month in winter to see which plants stand out at this time of year. You don’t have to buy a plant every time you go to the nursery, although I rarely leave without a small specimen plant or garden ornament. It really is OK to shop just to get ideas or for inspiration. If you haven’t done so in a while, I think you will be delighted by the uplifting experience of a good nursery walk in winter.

When a nursery plant catches my eye in January, lined up in straight rows with a 101 other potted plants, I can’t help imagining how it would look planted out in a garden. When we talk about plants in the winter garden, we typically refer to a different set of attributes than we would about spring, summer and autumn plants. In a sense, the descriptions of plants that stand out in the coldest months of the year make reference to the most basic of plant qualities.

Rather than flower display, we speak of form and structure, the plant’s basic presence. Plants with winter interest often serve the garden well throughout the year but stand out in winter for their berries, textural bark, fruit or seeds. If you are just beginning to choose plants for winter interest, consider the basic quality of winter presence.

Leaf texture is important. The most obvious consideration in this category will be needle and broadleaf evergreens. Here again, we are blessed in the Pacific Northwest with ideal growing conditions for a broad range of both types of plants. Nothing could be more appropriate in Washington than a stand of Douglas fir or western hemlock — ideal backdrops for large parks and public gardens.

Dwarf conifers

For the home garden, I appreciate the huge selection of dwarf conifers now available for the smaller garden and use many of them as accents to give the garden four seasons of interest. I have to emphasize that dwarf, when applied to plants, does not mean tiny. It doesn’t even have to mean small. It does imply that the plant is smaller than other plants in the same family.

Von Helms hemlock is a true dwarf cultivar of hemlock with a cone-like shape and dark green foliage. Cones and buds are typically small and the bark is usually brown and furrowed. Grown as a specimen plant, it’s as wide as or wider than tall, with graceful, weeping branches. Fairly slow to develop its potential size, it’s a medium shrub of 5 to 8 feet for many years but eventually capable of spreading 15 to 20 feet or more.

Take advantage of the barrenness of the season and plant deciduous trees with good bark color and texture. The European white bark birch is breathtaking. Its stunning brother, the river birch, has cinnamon brown bark that flakes and curls in translucent sheets. A single, clump-forming birch will have multiple trunks to show off its bark but won’t overwhelm a small garden.

While winter is upon us, it’s the evergreens and structural deciduous plants that emerge from the background as strong, steadfast sentries watching over the landscape. Now we see the bones of the garden. If your garden was based on a planned layout, this is the time of year to see that layout as it was intended to be. Winter-interest trees and shrubs rarely call for one’s attention, but when all the distractions fade away, we are suddenly drawn to their attributes and we find them quite worthy of our admiration.

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