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Eye-catching
Winter
Plants
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The colorful reds and blues of
election year yard signs are now the predominant
feature of the Wyobraska landscape, their quiet
presentation of the candidate’s name a civilized
alternative to the mudslinging rhetoric of TV and
radio commercials. But this artificial
every-other-year fall color will soon become trash
for the forgettable losers and potential future
e-bay auction items for the soon to be famous
winners.
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Ornamental grasses. Also easy
to spot in the winter Wyobraska landscape are a
rapidly growing number and variety of ornamental
grasses. Ranging in size from the 8-12’ tall hardy
pampas grass down to the 2-3’ tall russet colored
little bluestem, ornamental grasses are the other
signature plant of the region’s winter landscape.
There’s certainly no surprise in that, because these
are the two dominant plants in the region’s
indigenous landscape, as well. Winter interest
shrubs. Look a little more carefully, and you’ll
find that a number of shrubs take on a colorful
wintertime |
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Previous Articles
April 27, 2006
Crazy Clematis
May 04, 2006
Ornamental Grasses
May 11, 2006
Perennials
May 18, 2006
Herbs
May 25, 2006
Hummingbird Garden
Party
June 1, 2006
Gardening with Kids
June 8, 2006
Wildflower Week
June 15th
Shade Garden
June 29
Thumbs,
Feathers, Fruit
July 6, 2006
Reading Plants
July 13th
Back to the Oregon
Trail
July 20th
Theatre West Garden
Walk
July 27th
Notes from the Garden Walk
August 4th
Cereal Killers
August 10th
Grass Hedges
August 17th
Xeriscape
Refresher Course
August 24th
Fall is for
Planting
August 31st
Tree Roots at the
Old Pen
September 7th
Recipe for Enjoying
Autumn Landscapes
September 14th
On the Road to Casper
September 15th
Fall is in the Air
October 5th
Seeing Red
October 13th
To Rake or Not to
Rake
October 19th
Enjoying
the Arriving Winter Landscape
Coming Soon
A Prairie Garden Journal
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And the Wyobraska landscape
will revert to its innate late fall shades of rusty
reds and browns, fading yellows, and the still
bright greens of lawns and evergreen trees and
shrubs.I have come to believe that the real test of
a Wyobraska landscape is not how colorful it is in
the summertime, but how interesting it is in the
wintertime. It is relatively easy to create a
landscape that develops attractive and colorful
plant combinations for our beautiful, sunny
summers. But it requires quite a bit more thought
to create a landscape that can hold your interest
through Wyobraska’s long winter season.
To be sure, our winter season
is often not very wintery in terms of snow and
cold. So weather wise, many of our winters seem
short. But in landscape terms winter is the period
of time when trees and shrubs don’t have their
leaves, and in those terms our Wyobraska winter
lasts from, well, now through next April. It is
easily the longest season on the landscape calendar,
and yet it is often the least planned for season
when homeowners plan and create their home
landscapes.
It turns out that there is an
ironic twist to the summer vs. winter landscape
design dilemma—not all landscape that are attractive
in the summer are also attractive in the winter, but
almost all landscapes that are attractive in the
winter, are also attractive in the summer. The
almost foolproof way to design a Wyobraska landscape
that will be visually interesting year-round is to
design your landscape to look good in the winter.
Rather than look at the next five to six months as
a forced sentence to a visual landscape wasteland,
begin looking around at landscapes or even just
landscape plants that catch your eye as you drive
through and around our Wyobraska communities.
I’m guessing you’ll see some or
all of the following types of eye-catching winter
plants:
Evergreen trees and shrubs.
Evergreens have long been important plants in
Wyobraska landscapes. They disappear in late spring
into the uniformly green foliage of the summertime
landscape, but they reappear again as the foliage of
deciduous trees and shrubs take on their autumn
colors and then become their stark wintertime
skeletons. I tend to prefer the green color of
pines and junipers over the bluer colored Colorado
spruce in the wintertime landscape, but I freely
admit that to be a personal preference.
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appearance.
Probably most striking are the red-twigged
dogwoods. You’ll see these ranging in size from the
compact Isanti dogwood at 4-6’ in height to the
taller standard dogwood varieties at 6-8’ in
height. When these winter accent shrubs are planted
in front of an evergreen tree, or a white building,
they are hard to overlook—and their bright red stems
hold their winter color well into early spring.
Rabbitbrush is a xeriscape shrub that remains
semi-evergreen in winter. An annual springtime
pruning keeps this shrub from getting gangly. In
shady locations, the summertime softball sized white
flowers of Annabelle hydrangea slowly dry through
fall and as the large green leaves turn yellow and
eventually fall off the 3-4’ stems, the plant takes
on a unique and attractive “dried flower”
appearance that lasts through the winter. This easy
maintenance shrub requires only an annual pruning
back to the ground in the early spring. Blue mist
spirea is a full-sun shrub that is long blooming in
the summertime, then takes on a similar winter
appearance. And finally, the growing use of hardy
shrub roses in Wyobraska landscapes means that
you’ll be spotting more roses with brightly color
orange and red “hips” in wintertime landscapes. The
small, hard, berry-sized hips are the fruit of the
rose plant. By the way, most are edible (I didn’t
say tasty) and loaded with vitamin C. The displays
vary from modest to striking depending upon the
variety and the year.
Perennials. Finally, the
stalks and seed heads of many perennials are strong
and durable enough to remain erect and retain their
physical presence in the landscape through much of
the winter. They vary in color from light to dark
brown, a few with hints of orange. A caution
though, only a relative few perennials develop the
kind of almost woody stalks necessary to stand up to
winter winds and snows. Many of the perennials that
do are the ones developed originally from summer
blooming prairie wildflowers—so they feel and look
right at home in our Wyobraska landscapes.
This will be the last gardening
column for this season. I would like to thank those
readers that have made often kind and occasionally
“constructive” comments to me about these columns
this past summer. Both types of comments are
appreciated.
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