Don’t stop gardening now: It’s just getting colorful!
October 7, 2009
By Contributor
Create garden drama in winter
Current trends in landscape design focus on gardens that have something interesting to look at year round. In our mild Northwest climate, that means a strong focus on winter plants as well as summer. Here are some plants that will do very well in your winter landscape:
- Winter flowering shrubs: Camellia sasanqua, sarcacocca, mahonia, viburnum bodnantense – bloom and fragrance in our area between November and February.
- Bold foliage plants: fatsia, phormium, choisya ‘Sundance’, heuchera, euphorbia, hellebore
- Trees: Himalayan birch, evergreen magnolia, paper bark maple
- Place large-scale containers with bold color in the garden. Plant them with smaller versions of hardy perennials that can be planted out in beds in spring.
- Grasses both tall and short give many reasons for inclusion in the winter garden. They provide shelter, nesting materials and, many times, food for birds.
- Deciduous and evergreen shrubs that offer colorful bark or berries: red or yellow twig dogwood, beauty berry, winter berry, holly
— Christina Salwitz
Decorate with fall bounty
Now that autumn has arrived and the garden in bursting and ready for harvest, consider the many amazing decorating possibilities that will bring the bounty inside.
Scoop out a Cinderella pumpkin and place a vase inside. Heap the vase with mounds of fresh flowers, berried branches, tall grasses, evergreen foliages and maple braches with their crisp, fall color to create a lush harvest, bouquet style.
To ensure longevity in vase arrangements, always start with a clean vase of fresh water. Remove any foliage from the stems below the water line to reduce the potential for bacteria growth in the water. Give the end of every stem a fresh cut to 1 inch before it goes in the vase, to reopen the stem to drink.
Create a welcoming front entrance to your home. Stack hay bales with beautiful pots full of winter pansies, ornamental grass, chrysanthemums, cabbage and kale plants. Add carved pumpkins, scarecrows and corn stalk bundles. Place a pumpkin or winter squash on every stair step. Or stack and secure pumpkins of different sizes on a sturdy planter.
In no time at all, you can transform your home for the harvest season.
— Susan Rabago
Plant a tree like a pro
Fall is the best time to plant trees and shrubs. Not only will they get plenty of water from the annual Pacific Northwest monsoon season, but plants like to spend their winters quietly growing roots underground and out of our sight, resulting in a stronger base to push out a lot of new leaves and flowers next spring.
Dig a $100 hole. In other words, a better hole than you really want to. Make it twice as wide as the plant’s pot, but no deeper. This will give the roots plenty of room to spread out and become quickly established.
Don’t be too gentle! Plants purchased in the fall often have tangled roots from being stuck in their pots all summer. Pull the plant out of the pot and rough up the roots with your fingers, or use a knife to make two or three vertical slices.
Plant once, water twice. Set the plant in the hole at the same depth, or slightly higher than it was in the pot. Fill the hole with water and a low nitrogen transplant fertilizer. Go get a drink while you wait for the water to drain. Then, backfill with the soil, mixed with no more than 25 percent compost. Firm this down, and water well with at least five gallons of water. Keep mulch pulled away from the base of the plant and keep it well-watered for the first year.
— Heather Bradley
The contributing authors are professional gardeners and landscape designers employed at Newcastle Fruit & Produce.
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