Get the Most out of Your Garden Year Round With Seasonal Planting

Designing a garden that delights in every season is both challenging and highly rewarding. Using color, scent, shape and form, you can keep interest going for all 365 days.

Excerpted from Garden Design
Filed under: Gardening, Annuals

Winter Interest

Winter doesn't seem so barren when your plantings provide color and interest. Winter-flowering honeysuckle, witchalder, witch-hazel, Oregon grape holly, sweet box and viburnum offer flowers and scent, and the berries or catkins of hazels, cotoneaster, hawthorn, silktassel and mountain ash add color and texture. Evergreens and their variegated forms deliver winter foliage, while the bare bones of dormant perennials, such as black-eyed-susans and stonecrops, and the stems of grasses, such as Japanese silver grass (also, maiden grass), all add to the beauty of the winter garden. Trees also make stunning contributions to a wintry scene: birches with their stark white trunks; the twisted silhouette of contorted European filberts; and the flowers of the autumn flowering Higan cherry.

An underplanting of snowdrops makes the dark base of dogwood shrubs sparkle (image 1).

One Garden, Four Seasons

By underplanting a wide range of shrubs and perennials with naturalized spring bulbs you can achieve year-round interest without the need for bedding plants. The unsung heroes of winter are deciduous trees — without the distraction of foliage you can better appreciate their attractive bark and shapely forms.

Spring (image 1), summer (image 2), fall (image 3) and winter (image 4)

Enlarge Photo+Shrink Photo-DK - Garden Design © 2009 Dorling Kindersley Limited
Enlarge Photo+Shrink Photo-DK - Garden Design © 2009 Dorling Kindersley Limited
Enlarge Photo+Shrink Photo-DK - Garden Design © 2009 Dorling Kindersley Limited
Enlarge Photo+Shrink Photo-DK - Garden Design © 2009 Dorling Kindersley Limited