There aren’t many flowers blooming in the garden in Winter, so we look to the ones with colored foliage to give us some interest in the garden this time of year. A couple of these change color with the cold during the change of seasons, but most of them are colored all year long. But they’re especially valued in this otherwise rather drab season.
This Cryptomeria elegans is one that changes from a lush green in summer to this lovey purple in winter. It’s one of the fastest growers in the garden. It’s only 8 years old and has grown over 20 feet in that time. The bark is a beautiful reddish brown that adds even more color to it. It’s one of my favorite plants in the garden all year, but it’s especially nice now.
From one of the tallest plants in the garden to one of the smallest. This is a small patch of Black Mondo Grass (Ophiopogan planiscapus “Nigrescens”). It’s this lovely black all year long, one of only a few black plants I know of. This clump is by the back gate and under a weeping purple beech. You can’t see them much in the summer, tho what you can see goes well with the purple beech. So this is their time to shine. The silver globe is an old cannon ball we painted, just for fun. Art is everywhere…
Here’s’ a large one that is easily recognizable – a Colorado Blue Spruce (Picea pungens “Glauca”). A common enough plant but its blue is so beautiful all year it’s a treat to have all the time. It’s in the front yard and provides a nice focal point to the corner of the garden. It gets big and it’s very prickly – the specific name “pungens” mean sharp, so I’ll have to prune it carefully so we can walk by it safely.
This is another small one – a Morgan’s Chinese arborvitae (Thuja orientalis “Morgan”). I didn’t even know there were arborvitae in Asia so this was a treat to find in a nursery when I was looking for a yellow plant to provide some bright color in the front yard. It won’t grow to be more than 3′ x 2′ and it’ll take it years to get that big. That’s OK because I love dwarf conifers and have a lot of them.
This is another one that changes color with the colder weather. It’s a Heavenly Bamboo (Nandina domestica “Moyer’s Red”), and not only offers us a beautiful color change but also these lovely bright red berries. Unfortunately they’re not good bird food but they sure are nice eye candy. This is at the corner of the entrance to the yard so it gets viewed all the time by passers by. You can see it a block away.
This one shows two plants in one shot, really three if you count the tiny Iris reticulata by the Blue star Juniper (Juniperus squamata “Blue Star”) at the top of the picture. The juniper is always this nice blue but the one in the front is the really cool one to me. It’s a Toffee Twist Sedge (Carex flagillifera “Toffee Twist”) and it’s gotten to this size in one year from a 4″ pot! We step on its leaves all the time so it stays “trimmed”, and that seems to work OK.
Here’s another nice blue one. It’s a Snow White Lawson Cypress (Chamaecyparis lawsoniana “Snow White”). It’s a nice columnar plant and it works well at the corner of the yard by the gate. It grows very slowly and will only get 6′ tall they say, and it’s almost that tall now, so I think it may get bigger. It’s also blue all year, even in the shade where most colored plants won’t color well. It’s very soft to the touch and has upright branching, as opposed to the shaggy downward branching of the species.
This is another one that changes color in the fall and winter. It’s a PJM Regal Rhododendron (Rhododendron “PJM Regal”) and turns this nice purple in winter. It’s an early bloomer and will be in bloom in the not too distant future. It has wonderful bright pinkish purple flowers that stand out nicely against the dark green of the pyramidal arborvitae behind it. It’ll get 5′ tall in time.
One of the few golden plant we have, this is a Daniellow Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata “Golden Spire”). It grows a foot and a half a year and will get to 20′ in time. It’s a cultivar of the most useful tree of the Pacific Northwest, as far as the native people were concerned. It’s their “Buffalo” as far as the many uses they had for it. The species is a huge tree and covers miles of land in this area of the world. It’s very cool to have this as a reminder of the big ones.
One last blue one. This is a Sawara False Cypress (Chamaecyparis pisifera “Baby Blue”) and will get to about 6 feet tall, which it almost is now, so it may get bigger. It’s at the corner of what I used to call the Heather bed, but the heathers mostly died in the big freeze of last winter so I dunno what to call it now. Just a nice planting bed I guess. Some spider mites or something bad got into it last year and we lost the back half of it, but I was able to cover it up with other branches. A sweet, soft little plant.
So that’s it for now. I have more but they aren’t big enough to show off yet. Maybe in a few years I’ll do this again. Probably. It’s so nice to have these colorful creatures in the garden now to bring some winter cheer into our lives when we walk in the garden during these days of grey and overcast skies. I hope you enjoyed seeing them and that I gave you some ideas of how to color up your own winter garden!
Colorfully good wishes, Steve
Gardening in Greenwood 