Many gardeners are happy to trade in their trowels for a nice cup of tea by the fire this time of year. That’s a fine pursuit, and I’ve indulged in a bit of it myself lately. Winter holds its own wonders in the garden though, and it would be a shame to let them pass unnoticed.
The winter garden requires a change in perspective. Your senses will not be assaulted with overblown scented roses or peonies the size of dinner plates. Appreciating the winter garden means taking note of texture, form and subtle color. Seeing the garden stripped of most of its embellishment offers an opportunity to study its architecture, the framework that our flowery summer pictures are hung upon.
Toby Bost, a Forsyth County extension agent and the director of the arboretum at Tanglewood, will lead a tour of the arboretum’s many winter-interest plants at 11 a.m. Wednesday. It will be a great opportunity for gardeners to see the potential for year-round gardening that can be seen throughout the Arboretum.
Dozens of hollies
The collection includes dozens of hollies, several of which form a backdrop to the ornamental grass garden. The tawny, spent foliage of the grasses is beautifully highlighted against the dark evergreen background. Osmanthus and cherry laurel also add to the evergreen framework. Bost said that these are just a few of the shrubs that homeowners could consider for evergreen screens to block unwanted views on their property. One particularly outstanding example is a holly called Ilex meservae Blue Prince, whose small, dark blue-green leaves densely coat the wide, round shrub. Tiny purple flower buds cluster in the leaf axils.
Some of the grasses in the ornamental garden are as attractive in their sere winter state as they were when alive and green. The beautiful purple muhly grass has seen its best day, but the zebra miscanthus displays golden highlights among the repeating pattern of its large, sickle-shaped blades. It contrasts with the morning light miscanthus whose dense impenetrable form belies the much finer texture of its leaves. Both are topped with unfurling, feathery plumes in fountain-like masses.
Theme gardens
Nearby are the firework-like flowering of switch grass and the low mounds of fountain grass still holding on to their summer foxtails of flowers, now dried bottlebrushes.
Tanglewood Arboretum is broken into theme gardens, and each has its own Master Gardener Volunteer curator. There are gardens devoted to shade, herbs, wildflowers, grasses, vines, conifers and wildflowers, a rain garden and a children’s garden. The fragrance garden is being renovated with the project being underwritten by Evergreen Garden Club. Each of these holds plants of winter interest, and more are encountered as you walk from one spot to the next.
Evergreen rosemary, lavender, costmary, santolina and lambs ears keep the herb garden attractive in winter. The sense of smell is particularly acute at this season, and it is a pleasure to run your hands over the pungent stems. The shade garden shows rosy buds in the evergreen hellebores that mingle between evergreen ferns. Small plants such as lamium with deep green leaves netted in a silvery white are showy in winter here.
A new conifer garden was installed near the greenhouse at the arboretum in the fall of 2006 with contributions from Rob Means of Yadkin Valley Nursery. This area demonstrates the wide forms and color choices available in this group of plants from a beautiful powder blue, crook-shaped weeping blue atlas cedar at the entrance to the variegated Hollywood juniper, whose needles were colored in patches of blue green, cream and olive green. The brilliant yellow, threadlike foliage of Yadkin Gold Cypress shone in the garden. The conifers offer a representative of every kind of green as well. Two that caught my eye were the nest-like mound of a compact oriental-spruce variety with narrow, ascending branches and a deep-green columnar Robusta Green Juniper.
Tree bark in its many patterns, colors and textures leaps to the forefront in the winter garden. A beautiful dawn redwood with peeling strips of tan bark is one of Tanglewood’s treasures. They also have the stunning paperbark maple whose bark peels back in scroll-like sheets. This may be the queen of the winter garden. A similar effect is presented in the bark of the climbing hydrangea vines that work their way above the garden’s gazebo. The group of oak-leaf hydrangea also displays this curling, exfoliating bark, and they retain their dried flowers and a few wine-colored leaves as well. The crape myrtles at the garden exfoliate their tan bark in long strips, revealing cinnamon-colored bark beneath.
There were even a few flowers on the two varieties of Japanese flowering apricot on my visit, though last weekend’s temperatures may not have been kind to them.
It may be winter, but there is much to see at Tanglewood, and Bost, who is the coauthor of the Carolinas Gardening Guide, has a wealth of knowledge to share about the area’s plants. The tour is free, and participants will be gathering at the huge walnut tree in the parking lot behind the manor house.
Other coming programs include Butterfly Gardening, Sustainable Landscapes, Spring Blooming Perennials, Tomatoes, Chain Saw Safety, a Bird Walk, Container Gardening and a special program on March 1 with Bob Polomski, the author of Month by Month Gardening In the Carolinas.
Call Dorothy Stobbs at 336 703 2850 for more information on programs, and watch the Home Briefs in these pages for more gardening events.
■ If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27101-3159, or send e-mail to his attention to gardening@wsjournal.com.
