Get It Growing: Winning winter gardens
Published 2:30 am Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Think of your winter garden as an extravaganza of colors, shapes, fragrances, and textures. Spring, summer and fall gardens are lovely, of course, but winter gardens pop out of the gray landscape and triumph over dreary days.
The foremost reason for a winter garden is to extend your garden pleasures year-round. The colors brighten gray winter days, cheering and satisfying your sight and soul. An inspiring diversity of shapes and textures enliven you and encourage you to get outside, possibly to spend time on a bench in your winter garden.
As you sit on that bench breathing in the crisp fragrances of winter-blooming flowers, you are filled with the sense of peace and beauty. It’s fun and exciting to discover plants that love the winter, too. Your winter garden is a living decoration of your own creation, and the best part is that here on the North Olympic Peninsula, it requires little care and less watering.
Now are you ready to plant a winter garden? The easy part is choosing a location, preferably where you and your neighbors can enjoy it from the comfort of a toasty warm house. Large area or small, there are plants for all.
The hard part of creating a winter garden is limiting your choices from the hundreds of potential candidates. There are many possibilities.
The main characteristics of a winter garden are color, shape, fragrance and texture.
Plants for a winter garden include deciduous trees, conifers, shrubs, bulbs, perennials, grasses, and flowers. Mix and match! Here are some ideas.
Color
Foliage: gold thread cypress, Scotch heather, silver dollar hebe, ivy-leaved cyclamen, Japanese cedar, Chief Joseph lodgepole pine
Flowers: primroses, hellebore, grape hyacinth, pink dawn viburnum, tulip, daffodil
Bark: red osier dogwood, paper birch, Japanese stewartia, paper bark maple
Berries: bearberry cotoneaster, beautyberry, holly, Chinese Mt. Ash, barberry
Shape
Trees: contorted filbert, witch hazel, weeping Norway spruce, corkscrew willow
Shrubs: spiral Japanese cedar, creeping blue juniper, Hinoki cypress, Wissel’s saguaro
Grasses: ruby muhly grass, blue oat grass, black mondo grass, clumping bamboo
Fragrance
Tree: witch hazel, snowdrift crabapple, cherry
Shrubs: camellia, sweetbox, Mexican orange, Chinese paper bush, mahonia
Flowers: pansies, winter flowering honeysuckle, daffodils, winter aconite
Texture
Trees: birch bark cherry, lace bark pine, Scots pine
Shrubs: Oregon grape, Japanese thunderhead pine, Scotch heather
Other: decorative kale, ornamental grasses, ivy-leaved cyclamen
Here’s a hint: One of the plants that will give you everything in the your winter garden — color, shape, fragrance, and texture — is the witch hazel, sometimes referred to as the “Queen of Winter.” Try Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Diane’ with fiery red flowers or Hamamelis mollis ‘Pallida’ with bright yellow flowers.
This is just a brief list of plants to choose for a winter garden. Websites and books provide hundreds more suggestions.
And to further whet your winter gardening appetite, you’ll also find hundreds of photos to jump-start those creative ideas. Now is the time, so start planning.
While designing your winter garden, keep in mind the requirements of the plants you choose — zone, sun, shade, water, soil, height, and spread. With careful preparation and arrangement, however, you can have it all.
In reviewing Pollet’s book, the Irish Examiner accurately concludes, “Winter is as alive and vibrant as summer — when you let it be.”
Gardens, websites, books
• Witt Winter Garden at the Washington Park Arboretum at the University of Washington in Seattle
• Elizabeth C. Miller Botanical Garden in Seattle
• The WSU Master Gardener Demonstration Garden on Woodcock Road in Sequim
• botanicgardens.uw.edu/washington-park-arboretum/gardens/joseph-a-witt-winter-garden/
• greatbritishgardens.co.uk/seasonal/winter-gardens.html
• The Winter Garden by Val Bourne
• The Winter Garden: Plants that offer color and beauty in every season of the year by Rita Buchanan
• Winter Flowering Shrubs by Michael W. Buffin
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Marlene Shinn Lewis is a WSU certified Clallam County Master Gardener
