Offer Winter Gardens

By planning ahead, you could be helping your customers enjoy the calendar’s final season of beauty even in colder climates. Landscapers and garden designers can bolster business from new and existing clients by capitalizing on the homeowner trend to be outside more months of the year, according to Shawn Ryan, president of the Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado.

“With the rising costs of housing, people want year-round gardens, water features with ice, fireplaces and pits and outdoor kitchens,” Ryan says. “They’re entertaining outdoors around the holidays and they want spaces that create a spa retreat-type feel for their houses instead of going to a resort.”

Although the satisfaction comes late in the year, the planning for winter actually should start in the spring or fall. “What happens to most contractors is they start thinking about landscaping from March until the end of summer,” Ryan says. “They’re buying plant material in bloom, but there’s a huge niche for contractors if they’re proactive to suggest to homeowners how it will look in the winter.”

According to the Garden Writer’s Association Fall 2005 consumer gardening trends survey, only 10 percent of households planned to buy plants for winter, compared to 25 percent who planned to buy plants for extending fall color.

Achieve Long Life and Balance
Multi-use plants are the key to successful winter garden planning, says a garden designer and class instructor in Sumner, Wash. “When you plant something, always ask, 'How versatile is this plant?’ ‘How many uses does it have?’” the designer says. For instance, Japanese maple looks good with its fresh new leaves in the spring and provides attractive color in the summer. “The fall foliage has bright reds and oranges, and in the winter, you have a wonderful framework of the structure of the tree. Think how pretty that would be with the snow on it.”

The designer adds that foliage is beginning to rival the popularity of flowers as a feature that adds more interest to a winter garden. Cottage-themed gardens can be complimented by boxwood, winter blooming evergreens and small conifers. Conifers and broadleaf evergreens in red, blue and yellow hues accentuate and extend the life of Asian themes. Layering is another important design element. “It’s layering just like nature does with taller trees and medium shrubs, smaller shrubs and groundcover to keep the eye moving through the space,” the designer says.

Some winter-blooming shrub favorites include witch hazel, sweet olive and daphne. In mild climates, winter also is welcoming to vegetables such as broccoli, cilantro, cabbage, peas and radishes.

Enhance Hardscapes
Balance between soft and hardscapes also is critical. When considering a winter garden, it’s best to focus on an element, perhaps a statue, and add plants that accentuate it, Ryan says. The use of native grasses mixes textures and color into a garden. “Evergreens are always important whether using pines, arborvitae, euonymus,” he says, “It’s a fun twist to use deciduous trees and shrubs for their bark and their color like redtwig dogwoods, walking sticks and weeping cherries.”

Don’t forget architectural structures. Hardscape features in winter demand in Ryan’s territory are patios, pavers and outdoor room elements. Items he sees adding high-impact hardscaping in the cold season are water features that can operate with ice and reflection pools with colored water.

Other features like an arbors, gazebos, benches, post lights, boxwood gardens, statuaries and frost-free containers also are popular. “More and more people are using container gardens, and in the winter you can add evergreen grasses, small conifers, or evergreen trees and shrubs,” Wade says.