When winter has edited the garden down to its bare bones it affords you the opportunity to revel in details which are easily missed within the fully furnished garden. Grey-green euphorbias, of which there are many, may be blooming in the summer months but their role in the winter garden is to provide a satisfying glaucous foil against the darker evergreens or bare soil. Their \u2018softer\u2019 foliage is a welcome contrast to the \u2018tougher\u2019 nature of the evergreen tree and shrub leaves.<\/p>\n
The evergreen foliage of Iris unguicularis<\/em>, formerly Iris stylosa<\/em>, is the usual strap-like spray of leaves common in the iris family. These leaves are rather large, often untidy, which means that the delicate, lilac-hued, blooms may come and go almost unnoticed. If grown in a very sheltered spot, such as in gravel at the base of a south facing wall, they can throw up the occasional bloom as early as December. These early flowers have all the joy of spring about them and so precious, at this time of year, that they are worth picking and bringing indoors\u2014a single stem vase is useful for this purpose (and makes a great Christmas present too!).<\/p>\n Some shrubs and trees are grown for their brightly coloured stems in winter; the dogwoods are hard to beat in this capacity. In a similar vein there is a trick, which I first saw in Rosemary Verey\u2019s garden, which relies on the brightly coloured stems of \u2018The Red-twigged Lime\u2019 (Tilia platyphyllos<\/em> \u2018Rubra\u2019). This lime, when planted as a hedge, is deliberately cut relatively hard back, early on in the year, to encourage a good length of regrowth. When the leaves fall this flush of new twigs is revealed as a bright, practically luminous, orange-red \u2018fringe\u2019, most prominent along the hedge-top. Backlit by the low winter sun this horticultural trickery is as good as it gets and has seared such a strong image onto my memory that it can still be pictured vividly despite the intervening quarter of a century.<\/p>\n Another brain-seared memory is exiting the evergreen tunnel, in the garden of \u2018Sutton Place\u2019, to be confronted by the full majesty of Ben Nicholson\u2019s \u2018Wall\u2019, floating above the ground despite its huge mass. Not many gardens could house such a splendid piece of art but it does illustrate the importance of inanimate focal points amongst all the living elements; which really come into their own in the winter scene. Stone or simulated stone, there\u2019s nothing wrong with a moss encrusted concrete urn \/ birdbath \/ sundial, is an affordable alternative to your classic Ben Nicholson \/ Henry Moore artwork.<\/p>\n Variegated foliage can sometimes be \u2018frowned upon\u2019 by the horticultural taste police but the brightness of a boldly variegated leaf goes a long way to lifting the dullness of a winter\u2019s day. Those traditional Christmas constituents, holly and ivy, both contain some excellent variegated forms. A trip to a well stocked garden centre should furnish you with anything from \u2018green splashed yellow\u2019 leaves, of the ivy Hedera colchica<\/em> \u2018Sulphur Heart\u2019, to the \u2018marbled grey and bordered creamy-white\u2019 leaves of the holly Ilex aquifolium<\/em> \u2018Silver Queen\u2019, with every other combination, on every size and shape of leaf, in between.<\/p>\n Another way of adding excitement to evergreens, and therefore to the winter garden, is to clip them into all sorts of intriguing shapes; topiary. In its simplest form it could be argued that a hedge is really just a very geometric and practical form of topiary. You are, after all, clipping and trimming a tree or shrub so that it stays in a particular shape which is anything but natural. The fact that it also performs a function, be it boundary or windbreak, is the defining feature which makes this topiary specifically a hedge.<\/p>\n A garden, full to bursting with herbaceous plants in the summer, can have a second life in the winter if the beds and borders contain cones, pyramids, balls, or any other shape, of clipped evergreens. Repeating the same shape, at regular intervals, lends a formal \u2018backbone\u2019 to the garden. Using a variety of \u2018mad\u2019 shapes, in seemingly random formation, will lend an \u2018Alice in Wonderland\u2019 quality which will be masked in the summer only to be fully revealed, in the darkest days of winter, when the herbaceous players have left the stage.<\/p>\n Ready made topiary specimens can be quite pricey, due to the time it takes to grow them to a decent size, so, if you\u2019re stuck for a generous Christmas present, maybe some instant topiary would fit the bill? Being evergreen it\u2019s best to wait until the spring to plant them out into the garden. If you can\u2019t stretch to buying the finished article you can always start training your own using container grown specimens of box, yew or, as an alternative conifer, Thuya<\/em>.<\/p>\n You\u2019ll have noticed that I\u2019ve neatly avoided practical gardening tips this month. December\u2019s tasks are a continuation of last month\u2019s, \u201cwhenever weather conditions are favourable\u201d, and, if the weather is less good, there\u2019s nothing that can\u2019t wait for a nice sunny day.<\/p>\n Finally; if you\u2019re stuck for a suitable \u2018Man Gift\u2019 this Christmas, may I suggest you treat your fella to a good service? Of course I mean a lawnmower (other petrol power tools would do) service! It\u2019s something that often goes overlooked and a properly serviced motor mower will make the first lawn cut of spring something to look forward to rather than a chore to fear. I\u2019m sure the local garden machinery firms would be happy to furnish you with some sort of \u201cyour mower is booked for a service\u201d token if you went in before 25th December. On that note I\u2019ll leave you all to have Merry little Christmases and bountiful New Years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When winter has edited the garden down to its bare bones it affords you the opportunity to revel in details which are easily missed within the fully furnished garden. Grey-green euphorbias, of which there are many, may be blooming in the summer months but their role in the winter garden is to provide a satisfying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[19],"class_list":["post-1923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-gardening","tag-russell-jordan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}