Planning a garden for four seasons of beauty—and entertainment, too

Last year’s gardening season ended on November 20. I know this because I took a photo of a reblooming shining coneflower (Rudbeckia ‘Herbstsonne’) that was flowering away with a cap of snow on its flowers. Only a couple of weeks previous to this I had dumped out the last of the containers of annuals, herbs and assorted salad greens into the area that will become another garden in a year or two. I had also cleaned and put away all the containers, assorted gardening tools (including two I had misplaced, and which appeared as the perennials died back), and brought the hose, birdbath and other equipment into the shed. Nothing to do outside now except wait for spring.

But, wait! Just because I was finished planting, weeding, watering, deadheading and doing other garden chores, doesn’t mean the season was over. My garden was not merely patches of soil filled with dead plant material. Now we were entering into the quiet season of gardening when we stop to really see the subtle beauty of the season. Even after hard frosts and the last of the leaves off the trees in an autumn storm, there’s still plenty to enjoy in my garden—and can be in yours, too. It takes a little planning, but there are many exciting plants and ideas for four seasons of garden interest.

 

Hardscaping features

The permanent, built features of your garden—water features, walls, paths, arches or pergolas, benches and such—play important roles in four-season garden interest. Often referred to as ‘the bones’ of a garden by designers and landscapers, they are permanent, and plantings complement them. If you haven’t added any hardscaping features, late fall and early winter—especially after a snowfall—is the perfect time to assess your yard and decide what you want to add to enhance its year-round appeal.

With decisions made about features you want to add, you can plan out a budget and be ready to get going when spring comes. Of course, if you’re not handy, you can hire talented stoneworkers, carpenters, and other tradespeople to create your hardscaping. If your garden is well established, you may wish to move some plants, or add new ones to go along with the stone wall, or the blacksmith-made obelisk, or the water feature.

Late-flowering plants

There is no doubt that our climate is changing and with it our gardening habits are also adapting and shifting. We tend to have cool, wet springs, and of course in 2018 many of us had a hard freeze in June—not just a mere frost for an hour or two, but a freeze of hours. This led to damage in some fruit and vegetable crops on farms and in home gardens, as well as damage to perennials, shrubs and trees. (For the most part, perennial and woody garden plants rallied and were just fine.)

To compensate for these unpredictable spring conditions, we are tending to see milder autumns, well into October and even later without a hard frost. The leaves on deciduous shrubs and trees still change colour and come off at about the same time as usual, while many reblooming perennials will keep producing flowers until that hard frost—or snowfall—draws the curtain on the season. Perennials such as reblooming daylilies, coneflowers, cranesbills (hardy geraniums), fall asters and hardy chrysanthemums provide bursts of colour throughout the garden, and reblooming roses do the same.

 
Beautyberry isn’t hardy everywhere in our region, but in milder climates its purple berries are eyecatching.

Deciduous shrub and tree delights

Think about hardwood trees and shrubs once their leaves have fallen, and most often the feature that comes to mind is bark, such as the gorgeous papery bark of yellow and white birch trees, some maples and related species. But you will also notice that the bare branches and twigs of a number of shrub species are particularly colourful and eye-catching during late fall and winter, and even into spring. My favourite winter interest shrubs include ninebark (Physocarpus), with its peeling, striped bark, and the native red-osier dogwoods, (Cornus sericea) which can boast yellow, red, or flame-coloured twigs throughout the winter.

 Some shrubs look more interesting when they have no leaves on them than they do in summer. A great example of this is the twisted hazel, or Henry Lauders Walking Stick (Corylus avellana ‘Contorta’), which as its name suggests flaunts twisted branches and twigs that are simply stunning in the winter. Standard shrubs—shrubs that have been trained to have a single trunk topped with a mass of foliage—are popular with some gardeners and offer terrific winter shape, as do weeping mulberries and other shrubs and trees with branches that cascade from the main trunk.

Of course, we often select shrubs and trees for their spectacular fall colour, and if the weather is mild the leaves of many species will last well into November before dropping to the ground. From the well-named burning bush to Japanese maples, sumac, dogwoods and even some roses, you can have a blaze of glory in your garden. Some trees, including young beech and oaks, will actually hold their leaves into winter, a trait that is called marcescence. The leaves turn a papery brown shade and eventually drop off by spring, but they look very attractive before they do fall.

 

Berries, cones and seeds

Most of the plants in my garden were chosen to fill multiple roles, including as food sources for pollinators—butterflies and bees, bee mimics and more—as well as for wild songbirds. The sunflowers are cleaned of their seeds well before fall sets in, but there are many different types of seedheads which provide food for birds well into winter. Many flowering shrubs produce berries or seedheads which are attractive to us, and great food sources for our feathered friends. Likewise, evergreens produce strikingly beautiful cones, many of which also are sources of nutrition for wildlife as autumn gives way to winter.

In order to enjoy winter interest in your perennials, you have to resist the urge to do too much garden cleanup in autumn. Don’t cut back your perennials until late winter or early spring, so that those with great seedheads will help songbirds; as well, consider that many beneficial insects overwinter inside the stems of perennials, and we all know that our insects are under attack from habitat loss as well as other human-made issues. By and large the majority of insects are beneficial—or at the very least not harmful to our gardens. I practice the art of laissez-faire gardening except when the earwigs get annoying in summer, or when the striped cucumber beetles think they should dine on my zucchini plants!

 

Perennial grasses

It took me a few years, when I was beginning my hard-core gardening habit, to warm up to grasses, because back then I was all about the flowers in my garden. Grasses do, of course, flower, but those flowers are totally different looking from those of showy perennials. They can be equally showy, but in a subtler way. Their foliage and flowers also change colour as the summer and fall progress, and many hold their flower/seedheads well into winter. Plus, if you go outside when the wind is blowing, and stand near your grasses, you’ll hear them singing as their blades and flowering stems move in the breeze.

The showiest of ornamental perennial grasses has to be Japanese silvergrass (Miscanthus, various cultivars). The plants form lovely sturdy clumps of foliage, from which emerge stalks of flowerheads, which will change colours throughout the season, depending on cultivar, from soft purple, rose, silver or bronze to a shimmery white. My favourite is Miscanthus ‘Purpurascens’, or purple flame grass, which shows off with spectacular purple-orange-red foliage in autumn while its flowers change to white.

Another remarkable perennial grass is northern sea oats (Chasmanthium), which has distinctive oat-like flowers and seedheads which last for months beyond gardening season. Unlike some of the grasses, those seedheads don’t shatter when they dry, and they can be used indoors in dried arrangements or simply enjoyed outdoors.

Little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) doesn’t have particularly showy flowers, but it has fabulous foliage—blue-grey-green in summer, turning red and purple in fall, and eventually bronze in winter. If you have the space, try mass-planting a number of bluestem plants, as they look spectacular in a group setting, are tidy clump-formers, and will please you all through the year.

 

Evergreens

Just because they are referred to as ‘evergreens’, doesn’t mean these plants are only green in colour. Many evergreens have unique coloured needles—think of the Colorado blue spruce, or a golden-foliaged Chamaecyparis—while a number of broadleaf evergreens boast bicoloured leaves—including many of the Euonymus species—or bronze, red, or purplish-black foliage, like some of the rhododendrons.

Evergreens, be they broadleaf or coniferous, come in a dazzling number of species, varieties, and foliage colours. They range in size from petite heaths and heathers to dwarf specimens of juniper, false cypress and even blue spruce that will get no larger than a couple of feet tall and wide, to majestic tall spruces, pines and firs. There truly are evergreens for every garden—and as an added bonus, some of them change foliage colour in winter. A personal favourite is the tough-as-nails Siberian cypress (Microbiota decussata), a low, spreading evergreen with rich green needles in summer that turn a bronze-purple in winter. Once you’ve seen its striking winter show, you will want to add it to your garden, too.

Conifers, of course, also lend themselves to hedging, and no doubt you’ve seen splendid hedges, some left natural and some shaped with pruning, throughout Atlantic Canada. In the case of such a hedge, you’ve got a living hardscape feature that will provide shelter for wildlife and birds as well as offer you some privacy and perhaps even act as a windbreak. That’s handy, since one thing we Atlantic Canadians all share is plenty of breezy days.