As the old year ends in cold and darkness, the mind of the gardener turns to the beauties of spring that are very real and, we know, are just around the corner.
Our house is decorated as charmingly as never before, with all the Christmas lights twinkling cheerfully, and we leave the decorations up until Epiphany.
Landscaping and foundation plants should define the area that leads to the front door. Look how well the rounded dark and variegated box, plus the sedum in the foreground and the mellow brick create a defined and inviting walkway, with sage spilling over it.
For a break from winter, here is a summer flashback to a planting anchored by pink and white cosmos at the Betty Ford Garden in Vail Colorado this summer. Fresh and cheerful.
Every garden, even a very small one, should have some seating and a garden bench can provide a focal point, a design element, and a place of rest for the gardener and for visitors. The older and more weathered, the better. The bench I mean, but possibly the same applies to the gardener.
Yes, we hung them by the chimney with care. We had too – they are so over-stuffed they would fall off otherwise!
Holly is the classic holiday decoration, but it also plays a life-saving role in the garden, when its ripened berries are feasted on by birds, robins especially. In our trees they usually wait until January, but this year they have already begun and sometime we will have more than a hundred birds in our large, fruiting hollies.
For a tropical respite, check out this combo, blooming inside in a sunny spot: carmine mandevilla, yellow canna lilies, pink geraniums and variegated caladium.
This is the Christmas tree in the garden conservatory at Winterthur, formerly the Delaware home of the Du Pont family and celebrated for its stupendous gardens.
Switching from Christmas to a flashback to high summer with tropical plants, here is a planting anchored by canna lilies and begonias, captured in a photo made on Canada Day last July in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Just because we do not have flowers to drool over in the garden does not mean we cannot find beauty outside. Just look at the wonderful texture and patina of the bark on this massive and venerable Great Plains cottonwood.
But returning to a more seasonal theme, here are some glorious, dark red Christmas dahlias.
Snow outside on a cold December afternoon, with Christmas decorations on a kitchen window. Windowsills, mantels, windows, and doorways are all garlanded. Ivy and holly are classics, but so too are yew, cedar and of course all the pine tree family.
Water in the garden, even just a tiny vignette of water, is a critical design addition. Driftwood, rocks and pebbles are a simple enough feature but provide endless interest and of course the water is a great help to wildlife and birds, whose habitats are hard-pressed in many places.
Here, Christmas-y columbines are backed by the mellow, glaucous needles of a Colorado blue spruce. This could be a Christmas card!
Look how this pink foliage catches the sunlight and shimmers above the dark green of English ivy. Pure magic!
The garden reminds us that the Christmas season is upon us, with bold combinations and re-combinations of red and green. Here, the dazzling red leaves of a maple are arrayed above the dark green carpet of ivy.
The eye hungers for color as the colors of the garden drain away in late autumn, and we can still find some bright spots, as here with the flame-orange of pyracantha berries.
The best water features glow like dark crystals, with no more than 25% of the water’s surface covered with plant material. If you are lucky enough to have a water feature in your garden, you likely feel it is one of the best things about your garden, endlessly interesting. Add common goldfish and a few really good water lilies, and it is perfection.
Beauty is everywhere, but sometimes it is quietly subtle and not obvious. Here are some common weeds growing in a shallow stream or rill, observed on an autumn walk in the woods. Pebbles, weeds and water; silence and fluid movement, the spangle of a couple of fallen leaves. Sometimes we find beauty where we were not expecting it.
Colorado blue spruce, Colorado blue skies, and some shimmering, quaking aspens, in the Betty Ford Garden in Vail this summer. What a gem this garden is, an alpine treasure and well worth the short and lovely walk from the center of town, along Gore Creek, to see it.
‘Casa Blanca’ lilies dazzle in the summer garden, with their fresh, crisp and cool white. Their scent is famously intoxicating. Rabbits, I think, often eat the tender shoots of new plants, but recently I planted half a dozen new Casa Blancas and all escaped being nibbled. Now I have “too many” of them, but am certainly not complaining!
Sometimes you have to get right inside a plant to appreciate its unusual beauty in a different way, as in the case of the Japanese cut-leaf maple seen from the inside out.
Some gardeners detest honeysuckle because it is so aggressively invasive. I put up with it for its wonderful perfume and old-fashionedness. But having one of these about the place is a little like raising a border collie: if you don’t give it a job to do, it will drive you crazy. I make it grow up and cover tall forms made with either three or four uprights. They create dense, vertical features that provide a lot of interest in the garden and they are great habitats for small birds.
I think that the last roses of the year are very special, and not just because they are the last. Rose bushes seem to put all they have into these final blooms; they are not very numerous, but often they are some of the largest and most beautiful blooms of the year.
Also a star of the late summer and fall garden, Queen Anne’s lace adds a haze of frilly white to the garden, with their plate-shaped flower umbels.
The dazzling, five-petaled stars of the potentilla bush are a staple of many high and dry western gardens because the bushes are xeric and altitude friendly. The white form is also very lovely, perhaps lovelier.
Birds are feasting on the last of the oil-rich seeds of the sunflowers at this time of year, loading up on nutty calories for their late fall travels. Here, indigo morning glories wind themselves among the sunflowers.
Stachys byzantia, the common lamb’s ear, is a great foil in the garden, for its fuzzy, grey-green foliage that looks especially well when it is rimed with an early frost.
Weeds are flowers to, you know, and many can be cultivated for their wild and interesting looks. Among the most dangerous are thistles: their flowers can be quite beautiful, but if you let them go to seed you can spend the rest of your life fighting them and regretting it. Beware!
I love the vivid red-orange of sumac foliage in autumn, here set off in front of a beautiful Colorado blue spruce.
These spiky white dahlias look more like chrysanthemums than dahlias, I sometimes think. Their bright white looks great in the garden but is also a great addition to bouquets for the house.
Oregon grape holly is staple of many gardens and can thrive in many different climates and soil types. Its leaves give a lovely show of red and its distinctive blue “grapes” add color to the garden at a time when most of the color is draining fast away.
Late fall is the great time for the perennial sunflowers Helianthus maximiliani; they look so well paired with cheerful purple asters and phlox.
The crab apples are covered with fruit at this time of year. In a few cold months, the small apples will be a godsend to birds and other wildlife.
Abelia is a vigorous bush that flowers profusely all summer and on into late fall, providing a heaven-sent food source for hungry bees when much of the garden is slowing down into its late-autumn stupor.
It is lovely to see the colors of autumn through the windows of the house, with the active birds flashing through the trees in the low but still brilliant sunlight.
Nothing says late October, Halloween and early November like the combination of chrysanthemums in the garden and pumpkins on the porch steps where small trick-or-treaters will soon be traipsing past. The mums last forever in bouquets for the house, and come in an enormous variety of colors.
Asters are one of the things that also still brighten up the autumn garden, and their color range of blues and purples to almost red provide a lively burst of color in the cooling garden.
