Preparing for your ideal winter landscpe garden is begun in late fall before the first snowfall. This is particularly true of your landscape garden is more the feature of your grounds than lawn.
Lawn is normally flat grounds. Although it certainly supplies negative space in winter as in summer, when it occupies large sweeps of grounds, lawn doesn’t bear captivating shadows in winter because it IS flat. My 2/3rds of an acre of grounds, nearly all without lawn, stages plants of all sizes at many elevations probably no more than ten feet from highest to lowest point. It is in these sweeps of undulating grounds and the passages to lower or higher elevations of even a few feet, that winter’s shadows, forms, textures, and colors are so magnificently displayed over the landscape garden’s vast bed of white. This winter, due to its many light to moderate snowfalls has been exceptionally beautiful due to the purity, the cleanliness of its white showing off all other features.
Time usually dictates what herbaceous perennial foliage I cut back in fall, except I know what I want to maintain for winter landscape decoration. If winter starts with a deluge of rain and ten inches of heavy wet snow, most herbaceous foliage will be crushed and so, unavailable for winter garden display. This winter’s snow was introduced to my landscape garden lightly, gradually. So, here is a listing of some of the plants I preen for winter landscape garden display above the snow line:
Astilbe, the big Chinese, Visions, Deutschland, and most others stand erect and proud in their winter clumps, as if in bloom. Similarly Monarda, Joe Pieweed, Fireworks Solidago, Hot Lips Chelone, Vernonia, Baptisia, the Stonecrop Sedums, such as Autumn Fire, Garden Phlox, Tiger Lilies, Karl Foerster grass, some of the Miscanthus grasses, Goldsturm Rudbeckia, and Euphorbia polychroma’s golden wirelike stems all show their stuff well in winter even if the snowfall is deep but DRY rather than Wet and heavy. Yet, NOTHING in the garden perennial world displays snow more beautifully than ANGELICA GIGAS, (Korean Angelica). Its tan stems are sturdy, some reaching ten feet in height all appearing as candelabra proudly displaying two to four inches of snow covering the past season’s florets, some still loaded with seeds.
None of these perennials are the main feature of the idealized Minnesota winter landscape garden. As we mention so often the core of the “living” winter landscape gardened grounds is the evergreen conifer. Do not forget that over the past thirty years, new, spectacularly beautiful hardy evergreen conifers from all greens to the yellow to the bluish, from the tiny to the huge, the narrow to the fat, have been ‘invented’ or discovered….. for our horticultural zones from 3.5-4.8 now existing in our Twin City area southward.
It is certainly a shame so few Minnesotans have discovered these treasures.