Top Tips to Keep Gardening through Winter

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Top Tips to Keep Gardening through Winter

Gardens can often look dormant during the winter months, especially once the leaves fall from deciduous trees.

But if you’ve ever visited a garden filled with evergreens and winter-flowering plants, you’ll have seen a very different and more vibrant picture.

The fact is, with some careful cultivation, you can equip your garden with everything it needs to thrive even in the colder months.

In turn, you’ll have somewhere to spend some time outside, with the physical activity of gardening to help you keep warm on those clear, crisp and cold days of winter.

Plant Evergreens

For year-round greenery, plant evergreen shrubs and trees. These range from full-size to ornamental evergreens perfect for rockeries and borders.

Evergreens not only look good all year round, but because they keep their foliage, they’re also a good option for privacy and security.

The winter months are actually the ideal time to give evergreen hedges a trim, as it’s the time of year when you’re least likely to disturb any nesting birds – look out for robins as soon as the new year begins.

Use this time to tidy up the parts of your garden that actually are dormant, too. You can shape shrubs and cut back dead growth on trees. Just be sure the plant can withstand pruning during its dormant period.

Pots and Planters

Pots and planters are always a good way to add some more frost-resistant planting space to your garden.

By elevating them from the ground, you create some physical distance to help the soil escape encroaching ground frosts.

For even more protection, use frost fleece over the exposed soil surface of your pots and planters, which can make the difference on nights when temperatures are quite close to freezing.

Cyclamen is a common container plant for winter, and you can choose between Cyclamen hederifolium for flowers in the run-up to Christmas, or Cyclamen coum for some New Year blooms through to early spring.

 

Winter Blooms

There’s a surprisingly long list of winter-flowering plants, which can add colour to your garden even in the coldest months.

We can’t list all of them here, but just some to consider include:

  • Christmas Rose (Helleborus niger), the earliest flowering hellebore, whose white flowers can appear any time from Christmas to January.
  • Winter Honeysuckle (Lonicera fragrantissima), whose creamy blooms add fragrance to your garden and attract any bees active in winter.
  • Pansies (Viola x wittrockiana), some of which have been cultivated to bloom in winter instead of the usual spring-summer.

If you’d like to know more about winter-flowering plants from November-December right through to early spring, check in your local garden centre or ask the team at Bents and we’ll be happy to help.

Get Stuck In

The sooner you get stuck into your garden this autumn, the easier it will be to keep on top of things throughout the winter months.

Why not head down to Bents to see what seasonal stock we have available? Our Open Skies Glasshouse is the perfect place for some autumnal browsing, whatever the weather brings in the run-up to Christmas

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