Winter Garden Design: Plants for a Four-Season Landscape

Enlarge Image Image Gallery The simple, clean lines of the arbor house combine with the softness of snow-covered Scots Pines (Pinus sylvestris) and the texture and color of flowering quince’s (Chaenomeles japonica) lovely orange fruit to create an intriguing winter landscape at Sansho-En, the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Japanese garden. Photo By Robin Carlson

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Winter is often a neglected season in the garden, but a well-designed winter garden offers unique beauty—and having one might encourage you to bundle up and get some fresh air during the coldest days of the year. Even after they lose their foliage, many plants look striking in winter, especially if they’re covered with a layer of snow.

You don’t need to follow a set of complex guidelines to create a four-season garden; you simply need to think about winter beauty as you select your garden plants. Benjamin Carroll, senior horticulturalist for Sansho-En, the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Japanese garden, says winter gardens have a long history in other parts of the world, and they’re gaining popularity here—even in his notoriously chilly hometown. “I’m from Chicago, and growing up as a gardener here, you hardly ever put the words ‘winter’ and ‘garden’ in the same sentence,” Carroll says. “But I studied in England, where they have a culture and history of planting winter gardens. The Cambridge University Botanic Garden and Anglesey Abbey both have gardens designed to be at their peak during winter,” he says. “Here at the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Evening Island garden and the Japanese garden, Sansho-En, look great through the winter months.”

Selecting Plants for the Winter Garden

Designing a garden for year-round pleasure requires consideration of plants’ colors and textures from season to season. Carroll suggests those planning a winter landscape forgo the conventional fall garden cleanup and start the design process literally in their own backyards. “The convention in old school gardening was to do a late autumn clearing, but now people are realizing that if you choose well, the garden looks good through winter, so they wait and do a late winter cleanup,” he says. If you haven’t already cleared them, let your harvest-season plants stand, and take notes: Which plants look interesting or beautiful? Which might look better in a larger group? Which would look better in the compost pile?

Next, seek outside inspiration. Take a walk through the neighborhood, a park or a nature preserve near your home with a notebook and camera. Take note of plants whose seedpods, stems or winter foliage look picturesque. Take photos to help you identify unknown plants. If you can’t figure out what they are online or in a good garden identification book (see Resources), a local garden center can likely help you identify unknown species. Or check out the Leafsnap mobile app, developed by researchers at the University of Maryland, Columbia University and the Smithsonian Institute, which identifies plants in photos you take.