Digging In: Winter Interest in the Garden

By Jennifer Smith

When the excitement and flurry of the holidays starts to fade, many of us are left with a gray time in the calendar when it’s too soon to break back our pollinator garden or add new plants.  If it’s a garden planted for nature that you care for, it’s best not to putter about the garden. 

In the leaves that we left resting in the garden, hanging by what looks like tenuous threads from bare branches, in hollow stems and piles of debris, and below the surface, are the native insects and bees we worked so diligently to attract to our gardens. To stomp about the leaves on the garden floor, to inadvertently snap branches and stems, or tidy up this summer’s still-standing perennials, would be counterintuitive to all we set about to accomplish. “What do I do? Just stand there, trowel in hand, banished from my own garden?” you ask. Well, yes. 

I will concede that on warmer winter days it’s as impossible to resist the call of the garden as freshly brewed coffee. My inner gardener protests my inaction and demands I do something… anything in the garden. This is when I take note of what is still standing: where plants such as echinacea would benefit from the softening presence of a grass, where a new shape, perhaps a weeping form, would add visual interest to the garden and where new plants can occupy open spaces in the garden.  My gardens are intersected with gravel paths which, when the winter is mild, can become a bit weedy. The gravel is weeded or raked, and if I can pull a few weeds without stepping foot in the garden, I will. But mostly I just observe and make plans.

As I write this, in the publishing world we are always thinking a few months ahead. It’s now late November, and I have pincushion and yarrow in bloom outside my window — how wonderful. In our raised, steeply sloped garden, somewhat protected by our building, salvias are blooming as is a “Whispurr Pink” Nepeta.  The lantanas are still in bloom, yesterday’s snow event did little to dampen their mood.  Even our prickly pear is still upright: the longer this can last, the better, for it’s a rather unattractive plant in the winter. Some plants we honor for their contribution to the winter garden, and Opuntia humifusa is certainly not one of them.

If you look at your garden now, is it simply an expanse of mulch? Have you cut back plants that could have added winter interest like grasses and liriope? I’m constantly befuddled as to why so many insist on cutting liriope back to the ground in fall.  If our winter is harsh, the foliage may die, but often our fall is mild, and our winter may be that the liriope carries on well enough to wait until spring for a tidy up.  Part of the charm of liriope and grasses is that they lend winter interest to the garden. Liriope, a non-native ground cover, does have its usefulness, in moderation, in the garden. But, if you’re going to the trouble to plant it, and then cut it back each fall, you might as well plant annuals that offer blooms for the pollinators from early spring to the first hard frost: At least then you had three seasons of interest in the garden. And better yet, plants that are marginally attractive and offer little to support nature — Why not do away with them come spring and add plants that support nature and do a far better job of creating a beautiful winter garden?  

There you go, you now have a winter garden chore to see you through the next few gloomy weeks. Take a critical eye to your garden and its plants, make an edit list, be bold, be ruthless with this list. The more room we make for plants with four seasons of interest that also support nature the better.

Jennifer Smith is an award-winning pollinator garden designer with Wimberg Landscaping.