How to decorate your garden in winter with trees and plants
Content:
Decorated garden in winter: photo
The term "off-season", familiar to all gardeners, does not at all mean "suitable for the winter period." Winter garden decoration requires a special approach - it will be discussed in this article.
The easiest way to get an idea of the winter panorama of the garden is to study its graphic layout. Another way is to visit your garden plot in early spring, when the crowns of trees and bushes do not hide the features of the relief, compositional flaws, interesting corners of the site bypassed by attention. It is at the beginning of spring that household items forgotten in the garden, garden tools, buckets and watering cans, unsightly walls of buildings are especially striking. It immediately becomes obvious what needs to be camouflaged or removed from the garden, and what can play a role in decorating the landscape.
Garden in winter: trees and shrubs
Decorated garden in winter: photo
How to decorate a garden in winter: educational video
Trees with bizarrely curved branches and bushes with openwork crowns look extremely advantageous in an empty winter garden. Thin twigs covered with frost create the effect of frosty lace. Such plants cannot hide any unsightly places in the garden and rather act as a background.
Weeping varieties of willow, mountain ash, birch, larch are much more practical and at the same time spectacular. Their drooping branches not only emphasize the atmosphere of light sadness inherent in the winter period, but also attract attention, masking the shortcomings of the garden design.
Large shrubs perform the function of filling voids in the overall picture of the garden. These include honeysuckle, barberry, spirea in all its species diversity, astilba, Fassen's catnip, sage, hyssop, euonymus. The beige bark of some varieties successfully harmonizes with the winter color scheme, softening the contrasting transitions between the dark trunks of other plants and snowdrifts. And the thin branches of the crowns create the illusion of a smoky veil, which also harmonizes color combinations.
Garden in winter: colors
The traditional black and white winter color scheme seems obvious and the only possible one, but it is not. Conifers bring bright spots of various shades of green to the muted palette of the winter garden, mixing them with splashes of yellow-brown, burgundy, and gray tones. Shades of red can also be found in the winter garden palette thanks to the fruits of mountain ash, barberry, viburnum. It is worth remembering moderation so that bright accents do not turn a balanced picture into a set of variegated patches.
Winter music
The silence of the winter garden seems monumental, but it is also enlivened by natural sounds - for example, the crunch of snow, the creak of branches, the whistle of the wind. You can enhance the effect they produce with the help of plants. Thus, the crunching of frozen stems, the rustling of ears of cereal crops and the remains of paniculate inflorescences will give winter music additional depth and variety of motives. Therefore, tall cereals planted in the garden in winter are able to play an unexpected role as an accompanist to the voice of the wind. Paniculate inflorescences are characteristic of crops such as miscanthus, molinia, reed grass.
When choosing musical plants for the winter decoration of the garden, one must not forget that only winter-hardy varieties that do not need shelter are suitable for this purpose.
Fruits and berries
Fruits and berries have already been mentioned above as a means of adding variety to the winter garden palette. The fruits of barberry are rightfully considered the most spectacular and picturesque: large red dots sparkle in the snow like red-hot coals. The white and pinkish fruits of the snowberry, on the contrary, do not create a contrast, but merge into the black and white gamut of winter, giving it delicate shades. The fruits of hawthorn, sea buckthorn, wild rose, mountain ash, viburnum are also diluted with paints on a white background until they fall off and are not torn off by birds.
Coniferous cones are quite decorative, but their color and location on the branches should be taken into account. The fruits of some types of thuja are not distinguished by their beauty, therefore, gardeners prefer spruces and pines. Juniper is also very popular.
How to decorate a garden in winter: photo ideas
Decorated winter gardens: photo
