Winter Reveals the Bones of a Garden

Winter is no excuse for your garden to be uninteresting. In fact, winter is the perfect time to assess the strength of your garden’s design. Once the flowers are gone and the leaves have dropped from deciduous shrubs, the basic structure of the garden emerges. Suddenly, you can see how the size, shape and features of the plants in winter work to create the “bones” of the garden.

If you have been brave enough to leave perennials or grasses intact, winter will also be a chance to see how these provide unique winter beauty quite different from their seasonal glory, and how effectively they contribute to the basic design structure that emerges in winter.

Finally, winter can show the stark beauty of snow as it changes the structures in your garden. And, as you look at your garden structures in the winter you will immediately be able to see if they are spaced aesthetically or not. No plants in the way to mask your decisions in the winter!

Studying your garden in winter is one critical way of assessing your overall garden design and predicting how the garden will improve as plants change and grow. In this blog, we feature some examples to illustrate this important point.