Plants To Keep Your Garden Colourful Through Winter

Winter can be a hard time for the garden, cold weather and frozen soil makes it tough for plants to grow. Many trees shed their leaves in order to be more efficient over the winter and plants can die or deflower. This can leave your garden looking a bit dull due to the lack of colour. The best way around this is to plant flowers and trees which stay in flower and green over winter.

Winter Blooming Flowers
A bright flower can add a lot to a garden, perhaps creating a centre piece in a garden over the winter or, if enough are planted can give the garden new life in the winter. Here are some ideas for plants which will brighten up your garden over the winter:

– Snowdrops are tiny, elegant white flowered plants. They are quite small but can give your garden a beautiful Christmas feel. These should be planted about now (early Autumn) as bulbs or can be planted later on with leaves. Over time these flowers will spread and create a carpet of flowers in your flowerbed or under a tree in your lawn.

– Bellis Perinnis are bright plants grow in all sorts of colours including whites, pinks and reds. They’re also known as pom pom daisies due to their almost spherical shape. When planted around your garden these eye catching flowers can really make an impact. The best time to plant these is any time from late summer until early winter.

– Winter Flowering Pansies are hybrid flowers, bred for use in the garden. Winter flowering pansies have been bred to flower throughout winter. They come in many colours and the flowers often take on 2 different colours on each petal. Plant where you want them anytime from end of summer through Autumn for colour over the Winter months and into Spring.

– White Forsythia. A beautiful garden is often about creating levels, and planting taller plants like White Forsythia among the previously mentioned smaller plants will give you just that. The flowers are white and pink in the winter and green leaves grow in the spring and throughout the rest of the year. White Forsythia and Snowdrops are a match made in heaven.

– Evergreen Trees and Shrubs provide a ‘green skeleton’ and keep your garden full of greenery throughout the year and constant foliage when deciduous trees and shrubs are bare. Try Skimmia, Choisya, Laurels and Rhodedendrons for strong, glossy foliage all year round, and berries in the winter!

– Olive Trees can be grown in containers or planted in flower beds. They remain green all year round and add a Mediterranean touch to the area. Olive trees come in many sizes, for smaller gardens they can be grown to about 3 feet, but can get much bigger.

– Fir Trees can be planted in larger areas; again these can grow to all sorts of sizes and different shapes depending on where they’re from. They also provide you with a source of festive foliage for when Christmas comes along!

So – there’s no excuse to have an empty, boring, dead looking garden in Winter, if you plan ahead!