Winter Garden Interest III - Sculpture and Structure

Sometimes when I see the ideas magazines offer us for color in our winter gardens, I get the feeling that we all must be quite desperate. Why else would we all nod as though looking out at the brown and shriveled seed heads of echinacea or the mangled and broken stalks of ornamental grasses was truly a beautiful site.

By the time these articles want me to admire the mess left by the bark peeling off my sycamore I am about ready to give up and head south!

And yet I have discovered that these things can be beautiful if they are planted more than randomly. A garden of grasses can look lovely even in shades of buff. Hey - it's an improvement over black and white! And the bright twigs of a shrubby dogwood can be extremely colorful if planted en masse, even if they are a bit of a disappointment if you limit yourself to a single specimen.

So this week I thought we might take a look at shrubs and trees that offer us something in the way of real interest in winter - and try to suggest ways to maximize their impact.

There are many ways that shrubs and trees can create interest in your winter garden. The first way is not through color, but through form. Anything with an interesting form can bring some excitement to the otherwise flat and dreary landscapes of winter. Structures, for instance, not only give shape and a focal point to the winter garden. And there are many trees with forms so intriguing that they could almost serve as abstract art.

Manufactured Garden Form
When I look out my window these days the formless, flat and featureless landscape that originally greeted us is disappearing, at least in parts. The two rose arbors that my husband built for the main garden break up what otherwise seems to be an endless stretch of snow - or, in the absence of that blanket that hides all ugliness, the brown of dormant lawn.

The greenhouse, still under construction after five years, forced us to take down one winter feature that I always enjoyed. It was simply a trellis of square latticework that jutted out from the house. But when the sun was shining, the shadows that it cast were lovely - sometimes even dramatic.In fact almost anything that can create patterned shadows on snow creates a good look in winter.

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