Create A Beautiful Winter Garden
With Australia's cool winter temperatures, your landscape can quickly lose it's beautiful green appeal. Your yard and garden may revert to shades of yellow and brown until spring arrives. With a little planning, you can create a beautiful winter garden with winter-blooming plants that will add vibrant color and texture to your landscape.Preparing Your Winter Garden
Most winter-blooming flowers, plants and shrubs should be planted during the fall season when ground temperatures are still warm. For best results with your winter garden, it's best to check planting times and plant requirements based on a zone hardiness map for your area's climate conditions.During the fall months, new flower blooms and plant growth slows down to prepare for the cold winter temperatures ahead. Your garden may appear quite bare, but there's a lot going on under the ground that you don't see. Flowers, plants and shrubs that you plant in the fall are busy growing new root systems and absorbing healthy soil nutrients that will sustain them through the winter. All of that organic mulch you put down in the summer is decomposing and creating a rich soil base for hardy winter plants. Fall is the perfect time to put down another thick layer of winter mulch that will keep ground temperatures more even and add protection for your winter garden. Don't wait until cold temperatures arrive. Once your soil freezes, it's too late to add mulch.
Winter-Blooming Plants
Calliandra – These stunning shrubs bear bright red flowers that only bloom in winter. Blooms resemble puffy pom poms, and they're full of nectar that attracts beautiful birds.
Hellebore – Hellebore (winter rose) is always one of the early winter bloomers, even in the snow. The flowers, shaped like hanging cups, come in various colors that range from deep maroon to pure white.
Japanese Windflower – Also known as Anemone, the Japanese Windflower is a beautiful ground cover that forms a green carpet with delicate white, pink and purple winter flowers that float in the breeze.
Jonquils – Jonquils, as well as daffodils, are great winter-blooming plants. They're hardy, easy to grow and produce beautiful shades of white and yellow flowers.
Pansies – Pansies bloom from winter through spring and summer and into early autumn and even into winter again. They may look delicate, but they are hardy winter-bloomers that produce vibrant flowers in rainbow colors.
Primrose – With dainty flowers in shades of white, pink, orange, red and purple, primrose will add colorful blooms and deep green leaves to any winter garden.
Violets – Violets are unbeatable for their beauty, unique perfumed scent, and winter hardiness. They will bloom easily, even in the snow, and self-seed or spread by stolons or runners.
For more tips on creating a winter garden, check with a professional landscape service like Gaddys for advice on winter-blooming plants in your area.
imagecredits: http://www.gaddysplanthire.com.au/
3 Comments
Awesome, I've actually been on the lookout for some plants that can grow during the winter season indoors. I hate not having plants around my home and I am tired of the winter weather taking things over. Anyways, I will try to get some of these plants soon.
ReplyDeleteI would love to have a Japanese Windflower growing in my home. Especially a Primrose would be nice to include too. My wife and I have always wanted to style our home up a bit with plants and such, and to make the air much healthier, so I am excited to give this a try.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to get some plants set up in my home during this winter season. I imagine it'd help make my house smell better and actually more breathable. But seriously, I never really ever had many plants in my house, as I tend to be lazy when it comes to take care of, but these sound like it'd be pretty simple to take care of.
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