Structure In The Garden For Winter

Winter in the garden is a time when you can really see the garden in its barest bones. If you have a more cottage style garden with lots of flowering herbaceous perennials you will find the garden quite bare in the winter months. I noticed this in our home garden last winter.  Through the warmer months our garden resembled a tropical jungle however in the depths of winter all of the pretty perennials had died back or had been cut back ready for their spring flush.  We have a row of citrus trees and avocadoes that are all evergreen but the back drop of the garden was gone and all of the under storey plantings, were well and truly asleep underground.   I decided we needed to add some evergreen shape and structure to the beds so that we could still have a lushness to the garden even when the rest of the plants were dormant.  See images below for our garden in summer and then in winter. 

You can achieve evergreen shape and form in your garden through winter by adding a block planting of either a single shrub or groupings of the one shrub amongst your herbaceous perennials or even a hedge as a border or a back drop.  Some of the plants I suggest you use to create this structure are;

Taller Shrubs
Elaeagnus species, Viburnum tinus, Viburnum odoratissimum, Pittosporum “Silver sheen”, Escallonia iveyi, bay trees, Cupressus glauca

Medium Shrubs
Westringia species, Teucrium fruticans, Rosemary officinalis, Correa glabra, Escallonia “Pink Pixie”, Raphiolepis indica “Oriental Pearl”, Buxus spp, Euonymous “Tom Thumb”  

Strappy Leaves
Liriope spp. Arthropodium, Dianella spp, Lomandra

Ground covers
Myoporum parvifolium, Rhagodia spinescens, prostrate rosemary, Juniper confertus