Most gardens have a period of high-interest, but then they’re a bit boring for the rest of the year. It’s easy to end up with this sort of garden if you’re designing for a particular season, usually spring, when you see all the blooming flowers at the nursery and want to grab them all! A more sustainable way to approach this is to think about what things look like in the fall or winter, when flowers are hard to come by, and you need to use structure to provide interest. Take a walk around your yard during the year and see what’s left of things when the leaves fall off, or the perennials go dormant.
Begin by looking for what does not change with the seasons. Evergreen structure, grasses that retain their form, interesting bark, and seed heads that frost are all winter interest. Position them first, as they will provide a structure for the garden even when it is dormant. One of the biggest errors is to put all the evergreens in the back of the bed, like a wall of green, leaving the front of the bed empty. As the front goes dormant, it creates the perception that the whole bed is empty. Interplanting the static plants with the rest of the design keeps the depth close to where it is most needed.
That makes seasonal succession easier to control. The bulbs can be coming up among sturdy shrubs, the summer perennials can be planted between structural plants and autumn foliage can take over when they are done blooming. Look at the garden like a series of relays instead of a one act show. If there is a time of the year when it is looking bare, plant something that will bloom at that time and not add to the mayhem of already blooming seasons. This is where a lot of people overplant for the summer and end up with much more work than necessary and not much interest left when the flowers are gone.
A great short exercise is to take 15 minutes and go through each month of the garden, and just think: what’s in bloom, and what isn’t? And what’s the color and height and texture of those things? I don’t worry too much about what things are, so much as what they look like. And if there’s a month that looks blank, think about something that you know is a great performer in that time period. In the winter you think of something with berries; in the spring you think of something that’s fragrant early. Breaking it down into those months takes away the burden of planning for a whole year.
When there is a job for every season, the garden is not dead in the off-season, and little details are revealed like the drama of winter sun on tree bark, the movement of golden grasses in a breeze or the interplay between new growth and mature leaves. Rather than aiming for a series of bloom-chasing crescendos, the garden has a sense of continuity and always has something to offer in any given month.
