Eldemila Despite your best efforts to prolong the fall foliage season, winter will surely come, eventually. What then? What do you have to work with once the trees have dropped their leaves and the spring blooming period is still months away? Indeed, winter poses the greatest challenge to the goal of achieving year-round interest on your landscape.
Your choices for color are more limited in winter than in the other seasons. With the exception provided by evergreen trees and shrubs, the winter landscape is largely dominated by the colors, white, grey and brown. That is not to say that you do not have some choices. Red osier dogwood (
Cornus sericea 'Allemans') has an attractive reddish bark. A patch of fiery red osier dogwood against a backdrop of pristine snow makes for an unforgettable winter scene.
While evergreen shrubs and conifer trees undeniably add visual interest to winter landscapes, so do many other plants, such as red osier dogwoods.
A winning plant for winter landscapes will have one or more of the following characteristics:
- Contains colorful berries that attract birds for bird watching
- Readily catches snow in its branches
- Exhibits a delicate structure
- Is clad in a bark that is colorful or that has an unusual texture
- Bears evergreen foliage
- Has an interesting branching pattern
In South Carolina,
Hellebore, Lenten Rose, Christmas Rose are an excellent choice for winter blossoms. The colors of Helebore are soft and muted: pinks, mauve and shades of green. The plant grows quietly during the fall then offering those wonderful flowers for your eyes to feast upon. As soon as the new growth begins to show, cut off the dying leaves to get a better view of this illusive flower.
Garden designers often use colorful dogwood shrub in South Carolina landscapes to provide winter interest. There are several worthy ones, some with red stems and some with yellow.
One of the benefits of living in South Carolina is that we can plant and enjoy pansies in the winter landscape. Pansies are a remarkable winter annual capable of surviving temperatures down to the single digits, freezing solid, then bouncing back with vigor when warm weather returns. Pansies are planted by the millions in Georgia and are one of the top-selling bedding plants for fall landscapes.
By the time winter's over, let's face it: we want color, and we want it fast! Thus the popularity of one of the earliest blooming shrubs, forsythia. Forsythia blooms in early spring, well before many of the other flowering trees and shrubs.
If you plan carefully, late spring needn't take a backseat to April and early May, in terms of color. Lilacs are a long-time favorite that will bring color to the landscape in late spring. To supplement your lilacs, two other plants to consider are mountain laurels and hawthorns.
n summer, the brilliant spring blooms on trees and shrubs give way to just plain old leaves. It can be a challenge to find any trees and shrubs that will bloom for a significant amount of time during the summer season. In the Southeastern U.S., the long blooming period of crape myrtle trees is a boon to summer landscaping. In the North, your savior is long-blooming rose of sharon, whose flowers conveniently hold off until the second half of the summer.
Remember, Rome wasn't built in a day and neither is a great landscape so take one section of your yard at a time.
For more information, please consult your local Garden Center, Nursery, landscaping designer
or The Home & Garden Information Center (HGIC) Clemson University Cooperative Extension.
Good Luck!
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