Late Winter/Early Spring Color

Your garden should catch the eye and maintain visual interest year round. When planning your outdoor spaces be sure they offer a coordination of color each season.

Traditional landscape plans offer a few trees, expanses of lawn requiring frequent tending, trimmed evergreen foundation shrubs and isolated areas that provide color of spring flowering shrubs, bulbs or other perennials. Most of the show is over before you can be outside to enjoy it, and then you must care for this boring space that looks the same year after year, so make it interesting.

Achieve interest 365 days a year by introducing a coordination of blooming plants – trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals. Color is one of the best attention getters. It is the first element you discern when viewing a garden or landscape.

There are wonderful winter and early spring blooming plants that thrive in this region:

• Hellebores begin to open in February and maintain their flowering interest until April. They are extremely deer resistant evergreen perennials that will grow in heavy shade.

• Winter flowering jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum) displays brilliant yellow flowers sporadically throughout winter.

• Native vernal witchhazel (Hamamelis vernalis) and spiked winterhazels (Corylopsis spicata), both in the witchhazel family, are fragrant and begin their display in January/February.

Colorful barks of various trees also set off the winter garden. A few of them are:

• Striped maples (Acer pennsylvanicum) have green and white stripes running vertically along the trunks.

• Paperbark maples offer beautiful orange/russet red exfoliating bark.

• Coral bark Japanese maples have exquisite red leafless branches until the weather begins to warm.

• Red twigs of redosier dogwoods are standouts in the landscape.

Look at every characteristic of a plant, including bark, season of flower, leaf color, berries, branching habit and foliage texture. If several interesting characteristics occur on a single plant, it can add a long-season of interest and color to your garden.


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© 2012 Joel M. Lerner

Hellebore In Bloom

Vernal Witchhazel In Flower