January 2025
As if on cue, the first flower of the year, a pink and white Hellebore, begins to unfurl its petals on New Year’s Day.
January in the Garden
Spring bursts forth with flowering trees and bulbs, Summer erupts in an exuberance of color, and Autumn shines with brilliant foliage shades of red, orange, and yellow. Our gardens however should bring us joy throughout the entire year, but let’s face it, Winter can be rather bleak. If you look out your window right now and all you see is bare soil, dead-looking perennials, and leafless trees and shrubs, I would encourage you to take this time and think about adding some Winter interest to your landscape. My top suggestion would be to add some evergreens this Spring. Evergreens, from groundcovers to tall trees, can serve a number of purposes in your landscape, including an improvement to that view out your kitchen window.
Here are some of my favorite uses for evergreens in the gardens I design.
Various shapes and textures of evergreens, combined with hardscape elements like these two trellises and a bright red fountain, create visual interest even in the dark, cold days of Midwinter.
Create Winter Interest with Structure and Texture
During the cold months of the year, I start my mornings at the kitchen counter to enjoy a cup of coffee and the view into our small courtyard garden. It’s important for me to see that the garden still has life during this time, so during a recent garden renovation, we focused on adding evergreens of various shapes, sizes, and textures. You will see in the photograph above, we outlined a square of turf on three sides with small boxwood shrubs, mostly round, but punctuated with conical shapes to mark the corners. Underneath the boxwoods we planted thyme, an evergreen ground cover, with lovely pink flowers in the Summer. On the fourth side, at the bottom of a wooden privacy fence, we installed ground-hugging junipers to provide a different texture and add a bluish shade of green. To bring some height to the garden, we planted a three-tier, poodle-cut arborvitae, and added a spiral cut juniper to a tall planter. The space is completed with pyramidal dwarf Alberta Spruces in the hayracks on the garage wall. The evergreen plantings of varying heights, shapes, textures, and shades of green, combined with physical structures like the red fountain and the wood lattices, create a visually interesting space I can enjoy with my coffee.
Foundation planting - screening unattractive elements
Most of the houses in our neighborhood are more than 100 years old and were built atop stacked stone basements. These foundations don’t present as very attractive to passers-by, so many people hide them from view. Evergreens make an excellent screen for these situations, allowing homeowners the ability to screen the view all twelve months of the year. The above left photo shows three boxwood parterres we planted in front of our house. We trim the shrubs each Spring to match the height of the porch floor. In the Summer, we fill each parterre with six foot tall Canna Lilies to add a dramatic pop of color.
The middle photo shows how our neighbor has effectively paired two different evergreens with contrasting textures to hide his foundation. The combination of spherical shaped boxwoods with their small shiny leaves, and dwarf pines with their long bluish tinted needles, create an attractive and interesting screen for the foundation . Both are clipped annually to maintain the view from inside the house.
The above right photo doesn’t show a foundation, but rather something even less attractive - a concrete traffic barrier on a highway exit ramp. This structure, across the street from our house, was hidden for more than 20 years by a tall evergreen hedge. Several years ago the city cut down the hedge, leaving us with an unattractive view from our living room. Fortunately, around the same time the city removed the hedge, they were also landscaping a new dog park in the neighborhood. A number of tiny Arborvitae trees were left from the project and a kind neighbor asked if he could plant them in front of the traffic barrier. Four years later the trees are now almost as tall as the barrier and within another few years, should grow together to form a hedge. In the meantime, we plant tall Canna Lilies in between each tree to create additional Summer interest.
Creating privacy
Privacy is hard to come by in our urban neighborhood, with small yards and houses placed so close together. Many people install wooden privacy fences to create the needed separation, but evergreens offer an alternate solution. In the above left photo, this neighbor lives on a very visible and highly trafficked corner lot. They have no front yard or back yard, only a side yard with a nice patio with seating area and fire pit. The entire space however was totally exposed to people driving or walking past; not very conducive to enjoying a nice evening with family and friends. Their solution was to plant this evergreen hedge of English Yew shrubs. The dense foliage allows them to enjoy their outdoor entertaining space without everyone looking in.
The middle photo shows the side of our house which faces onto a public playground. When we moved into the house, it had been serving as home plate for baseball games in the playground. This meant baseballs hitting the house and players being able to look into the windows. We worked with the city to install a barrier fence several feet from the house and planted a row of Arobrvitae trees between the house and the fence. They have grown over time and created a nice year-round screen between our property and the playground.
Shelter for Wildlife
Winter can certainly be a difficult time for non-migrating bird populations. By January and February many of the berries and fruits on which they had been feasting are depleted. We place a couple of feeders in our yard to provide additional sustenance for our feathered friends during these lean months. We also ensure our fountain basin has water when the temperature is above freezing. In addition to the supplemental food and water, the birds also appreciate having evergreen shrubs and trees nearby to shelter from the worst of the winter winds, snow, and ice. The Arborvitaes shown in the middle photo above are located near our bird feeders and they provide a great place for the birds to take seed from the feeders and then fly to the protection of the foliage to enjoy the food. The combination of food, evergreens, and a water source help attract a much greater variety of birds during the winter than we see during the summer months. The Downy Woodpecker pictured above right is a great example.
