Winter Interest for a Year-round Yard

It’s important to love our yards all year round. Winter presents an opportunity to highlight the existing beauty of our landscapes and further beautify them. The types of plants we choose to plant earlier in the year and the steps we take to enhance these features now add up to make an enjoyable and attractive space to experience as we begin to wrap up the year. There is an abundance of winter interest to enjoy and so many ways to get started.

This time of year, you can notice more readily which plants are evergreen. Evergreens keep their foliage throughout the year, whereas deciduous plants lose leaves in the colder months. If evergreens have been designed into your landscape, there may be many shades of green, blue, silver, and yellow apparent right now. In preparation for wintertime, it can be a good idea to plant these evergreens in important “anchor” locations around your house foundation and other beds to make sure there is a sense of fullness when deciduous plants have dropped their leaves.

There may be fewer green leaves right now, but both deciduous and evergreen plants have value – although in different ways – this time of year. There are many features of both deciduous and evergreen plants that capture attention right now. We’ll take a look at a wide range of examples.

Grasses left to height in the cold season can offer, at first, a festive fall look that many of us enjoyed around Thanksgiving time. During the winter, their continued wispiness and height can add structurally interesting elements that offer interest after perennials have been cut back for the end of the year.

If you are interested in pops of color, there is no question about the value of berries – both as an animal food source and a needed splash of brightness in the landscape. Let’s envision a winterberry, a deciduous holly shrub with orangey red berries held starkly against tall, bare stalks. The leaflessness highlights the vibrance of the berry color in a way that is different than, and perhaps equally beautiful to, the fullness of the evergreen blue holly, which has glossy and intricate bluish green leaves and deep red berries.

Berries can attract wildlife that many of us love, and, in general, evergreens provide habitat for small wildlife in the winter by sheltering them from the cold and wind. Think of cardinals, the beautiful birds that don’t migrate from our area and instead feed on available berries, nuts, and seeds, while finding a home in evergreen trees and shrubs. Many find visits from cardinals outside their windows to be a welcome and magical encounter this time of year, and we have evergreens to thank in this case.

On the other side of things, deciduous plants can provide interest through their showy twig color. How can we overstate the beauty of a red twig dogwood in the winter, especially against a snowy white backdrop? These burgundy stems, made visible by leaf drop, add structure and color this time of year. This unique feature, similarly enviable in the yellow twig dogwood, can highlight certain areas of your yard by drawing in a lot of attention.

Leaf drop also allows attention to fall onto the trunks of trees, like Satomi Kousa dogwoods, that have amazing bark that peels or “exfoliates,” forming a complex textural image of varying shades from cream to gray. Elements of deciduous trees like exfoliating bark are special to this time of year because they are much more visible without the cover of leaves.

Another element made visible during the winter is the interesting formation of trunks of plants like the weeping Japanese maple or cherry trees. Some of these plants have contorted stems that are uncommon and highly prized. The weeping cherry may lose its green leaves for the winter, but its interesting structure becomes apparent both because of the weeping branches and the windows between them that give way to the stem.

Now that we’ve discussed the wonderful natural elements of plants in the winter, what can we do to enhance this scene? Uplighting a tree, especially large ones with interesting structures, is extra effective this time of year and makes for a spectacular show during the more numerous dark hours of a winter day. Quite literally a spotlight on your most magnificent landscape features, landscape lighting enhances the value of your trees, especially during the winter months, when the structure is more noticeable.

If an additional pop of color is what you’re looking for at night, we also set up holiday lights, shining a cheerful light on the formation of trees and shrubs in time for the holiday season. This is a homerun way to add interest to your landscape, cashing in on the features of your plants that are already present and waiting to be accentuated.

If you are looking for something more, consider container gardens. We design and create winter container gardens – small to large – using the greenery of evergreens to add festive and creative interest in planters at high-visibility areas. We use boughs and tips from firs, pines, cedars, spruces, and other colorful plants that are vibrant in the winter. We accent the greenery arrangements with decorative elements, including berries, birch logs, and pinecones, to bring the foliage to life.

We can focus on the natural beauty of the winter landscape and even add to it to better enjoy our surroundings this year and for many to come. Winter can inspire creativity as the warm feeling of a yard you love can motivate us to find solutions that bring you joy even in the cold. Give us a call to get started on any project that is of interest to you this time of year, and we are happy to help.