Winter Interest Plants, Part I- My Favorite Winter Shrubs

Christmas is over and we are left to face the cold reality that winter has really just begun. Yep, just a couple days prior to Christmas, and coinciding with Hanukkah and many other religious celebrations of the solstice, winter officially stole into our lives. These holidays are not mid-winter celebrations, but they are in fact, first of winter celebrations. Soon the evergreen décor and bright holiday flowers will fade into the drab grays and whites of the dormant season.

But must this time of year really be so drab in the garden? Much has been written about planning for the winter months in the garden, and I doubt that I can add much new on the subject. So I will content myself to briefly review some of my favorite winter interest plants.

To be of interest in the short days of winter, it helps if a plant has some characteristic that makes it jump out and grab the passer by. And that is what, perhaps my absolute favorite winter shrub does, it screams look at me. Native through out eastern north America, the winterberry blazes through the most drab of landscapes, be it natural woodlands or the most formal of planting schemes. You see, the winterberry is a holly stripped of its summer coat of green. It is a shrub reduced to its essence, its prolific crop of fruit, which happen to be bright red. Strung out all along angular, yet graceful branches are brilliant clumps of berries that are ¼ to ½ inch in diameter. In the wild this native American is most likely to be found in moist stream bottom sites. In the cultivated landscape it will gracefully exhibit its versatility, persevering in a wide range of soil, moisture and light situations. All the gardener needs to do is try to maintain a modicum of soil acidity and a male pollinator upwind. While one may think of this gem of a plant as a Christmas plant, it far transcends the Christmas season, holding its berries till spring. To my thinking every garden should have at least one married pair. My favorite named variety goes by the moniker, sparkleberry. This heavily fruited cultivar has an extra hue of brightness and large fruit. To my mind, it is perhaps the most outstanding cultivar in a naturally outstanding species. But to be perfectly honest, almost any winterberry warms my winter heart.

If a hardy nature is of interest, it should be of most interest in winter. Which brings to mind some winter blooming shrubs. Not jumping out and grabbing you by the arm, yet extremely compelling when noticed, who can resist the subtle, delicate bloom of the witch hazel. The yellow to chartreuse blossoms of Hamamelis Mollis that erupt at the first hint of warmth in mid-winter are a pure delight to my light deficient soul- spidery and eerie and strung along stout branches. Another eastern North American native, the witch hazel also is most at home in moist situations. Less tolerant of poor soils, the witch hazel of American origin prefers rich, mildly acid, soils and sunny to mildly sheltered exposure. The genus Hamamelis is also represented by H. Japonica, a close cousin with yellow crinkly flowers in late winter to mid-spring and by a hybrid between the two, H. intermedia. Several cultivars with variations on red and yellow flowers are also available in the trade.

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