A Colourful Winter

Are winter days, grey days?

Who says winters drab? Not me. With a little planning a garden can be interesting and colourful all year round. But there's also fabulous winter colour to be found all around us in our landscape. Just look at the wonderful view across these frosty fenland fields.

This morning driving into the city the sun low in the sky lit up the horizon with a hazy yellow glow. The early morning sunlight shinning on the mellow local Barnack ragstone of the Cathedral gives it a warm pleasing glow and lights up the Gothic spires.

This year has been very wet and not too warm but there is a profusion of berries along the hedgerows of the country lanes. The sun reflecting off these winter hedgerow fruits makes them glow a wonderful red and when it's frosty they glisten and glint in the sun.

Back home my Christmas cactus is a mass of pink blooms. This was a tiny £1.49 plant from a supermarket many years ago. It's really happy being neglected in my conservatory and blooms profusely every year. Occasionally it gets massacred when it's outgrowing it's allotted space.

This little pink rose is literally the 'Last Rose of Summer' in my garden. We got out there last weekend and did a bit of a chop back and tidy up. I couldn't bear to chop this last rose bud up into the compost bin so it's cheering me up on my kitchen window sill.

Out in the garden the Viburnum Bodnantense Dawn is flowering it's socks off. This coming spring I have to attempt to get some cuttings going. The bush rather old now and we need to do some alterations were it's growing. It's such a lovely bush for cheering you up in winter and the smell from it's tiny blossoms is out of this world. Dotted around the garden mostly self seeded are cheerful yellow wild primroses peeking through the unraked leaves. Occasionally little seedling primroses are moved to a patch of bare soil to brighten another area. My absolute favourite flower at this time of the year are the Helleborus, especially Hellebore Niger the white Christmas Rose, Heleborus Atrorubens the beautiful deep plumbs and pinks and Heleboris Orientalis the Lenten Rose. I usually make a Christmas table decoration with these lovely flowers with bay leaves and rosemary. Last year I was disappointed as they didn't appear until January but this year they've been peeking through and flowering for nearly three weeks. Heathers are not an easy plant for our soil. They like an acid soil and ours is alkaline to neutral but these winter flowering Erica Carnes heathers don't mind the lime soil and survive nicely under the evergreen golden juniper hedge.

The one flower that isn't flowering my garden at the moment is the cheerful winter flowering jasmine I've had several cuttings but they've never managed to get established before I've redesigned that bit of the garden. This plant, at the moment is a small plant after a massive pruning, it's flowering in my sons front garden. It's one of my cuttings from several years ago. Maybe next year I'll pinch another stem for a new cutting.