4 days ago
14
This time last year we were about to put our old flat on the market – the first proper garden I had as a gardening adult. The one that taught me so much, where I made compost for the first time and cut peonies from the bare roots I’d ordered as soon as we exchanged contracts on the place. Where I painted the back wall pink and strung up lights and held parties and watered the ground with cheap prosecco; where I planted a tree for my newborn son, and lay beneath it with him in languid, too-long summer afternoons, trying to make sense of motherhood.
Anyway, every time I’d show estate agents around our two-bed flat, they’d conjure unconvincing compliments about our airing cupboard, before sticking their head cursorily out the back door and saying: “Oh, it’s winter, no gardens look good in winter, no buyers will be expecting it to look nice,” and I’d seethe.
I’d argue that there’s an essential beauty to a winter garden, but it’s true that some look more considered than others, and those tend to have some structure. Trees, hedges, evergreens. Now’s a good time to both assess how your space may benefit from those – because you can see the gaps that might look better with, say, a handsome yew hedge picking up the frost – and also plant them, as long as the ground isn’t rock-solid or completely boggy.
You may have ambitions for a grand evergreen number that defines your garden year round, traditionally grown from yew or box – which these days arrives with understandable concern of box tree caterpillar and box blight – or something less formal that will blend into your bedding as the year turns, such as a hedge of Amelanchier lamarckii, hydrangea or rose. Hornbeam and beech, meanwhile, are beautifully deciduous, marking the colder months with bright foliage.
All of them can be planted bare-root at this time of year. Bare-root plants are exactly what the name suggests: the bare root of a plant, no soil, no plastic pot. Yes, it looks like a twig, but what you lack in instant gratification you gain in economy – it’s far cheaper to plant bare-root than something that has been cosseted into leaf and flower. The plants tend to adjust better to their new surroundings in your garden, too.
If you don’t want to commit fully to a hedge, it’s still a good time to build some structure into your garden with bare-root bargains. An idea stolen from Susanna Grant of Linda planting design is to add a “handful of rosa glauca, spindle, wild privet or hawthorn” to lacklustre tubs and containers in smaller gardens to boost height, texture and resources for wildlife. You’ll be amazed by how much they’ll have grown next year.
