Appreciating Gardens In Winter

By Shannon Hicks

In her wonderful 1995 book The Unsung Season: Gardens and Gardeners in Winter, gardener and writer Sydney Eddison reminded readers (and probably taught a new generation) that a garden’s pleasures do not stop when the leaves fall. Winter gardens can be as simple as continuing to garden year-round in a greenhouse, or as earthy as appreciating the plant structures left behind after summer’s blooms have faded and autumn’s leaves have fallen.

The garden at her home in Newtown, she wrote, had become a presence for all 12 months of the year, in fact.

“In pastel spring or the heavy green of summer, surrounded by blazing fall colors or revealed in the stark simplicity of winter, it is part of the landscape,” she wrote of the property where she and her husband live.

This week Mrs Eddison offered a special — and timely — lecture on this favorite subject. She offered a 60-minute slide presentation at C.H. Booth Library, in the lower meeting room that was filled to standing by members of The Garden Club of Newtown (which was sponsoring the special event) and the public. As always, her crisp speaking and sometime self-deprecating humor allowed this master gardener to speak to everyone in attendance. Mrs Eddison is well versed in the language of horticulture, but her speaking — and writing — makes gardening enjoyable and understandable to gardeners of all levels.

“Winter is New England’s season,” she said early in Tuesday’s lecture. “It peels away the soft stuff. You see the rocks on which we are built. It shows our roots, and what adheres to the trees during the rest of the year.

“You see the bones, the real Connecticut,” she continued. “You see what makes us Yankees. And in its way, it’s very beautiful. It’s simple — and in our lives, simple is what we really crave. Winter strips New England to its essentials.”

While summer gardens are filled with color and soft textures, the essence of a winter garden, says Mrs Eddison, is in pattern, line, and geometry; in bold contrasts of light and dark; and in subtle color harmonies. Winter can be celebrated for the nature of its presentation: the skies that seem clearer, the changed landscape, and even the snow- and ice-covered architecture of manmade and natural forms.

Winter is about seeing skies that may have been hidden by leaf-filled tree branches during the rest of the year. It is about appreciating ice-covered tree branches when they are hit by sunlight and seemingly lit from within. The season is even about appreciating trees.

“Old trees are beautiful,” she said. “You can’t always wait for a tree to grow to its full strength, of course, but the fun thing is you can always go out looking for them.” Mrs Eddison offered views of mature trees in her neighborhood as examples and she was right: they were indeed beautiful.

Apple trees take on their own look, too. A tree with green leaves and fruit in the winter becomes a twisted, gnarled skeleton in the winter.

“It’s different. It’s a new kind of pleasure that you cannot experience in the summer,” she said.

Snow is a great tool for those who appreciate gardens in winter. A deep snow can fully conceal the outline of a hedge, while a light snow can outline details of its foliage that are missed the other nine months of the year. Snow forms what Mrs Eddison calls “caps” on fence posts, and makes “marshmallows” on the “flat whorl” of leaves on an umbrella pine (Sciadopitys verticillata), she said. Snow also helps define complex patterns gardeners sometimes purposely plant into their land.

Garden furniture that has been left out in the yard can even take on a new form.

“Furniture left out offers its own charm,” she said, sharing a slide of a table frame and iron chairs at her home. “It takes on its own structure.”

Winter, said Mrs Eddison, is about contrast — “This is not the time for subtlety in bone structure,” she said — and change. “It’s time to celebrate the season and its subtle palette.”

Color does not completely disappear during the winter. While summer’s colors are the pure hues, winter’s contributions are subtle tones. Evergreens always offer greens, of course. Mrs Eddison’s slides included color evidenced in dwarf blue spruce (P. pungens), which offers silvery-blue foliage; prostrate juniper (Juniperus procumbens ‘Nana’), a groundcover with dense green color; golden false cypress (Chamaecyparis pisifera ‘Filifera Aurea’), pale yellow; Adam’s needle (Yucca filamentosa), also with a deep green; and dragon’s eye pine (Pinus densiflora oculus-draconis), which offers green and gold hues.

Berries offer drops of color in the winter. Plantings of barberry (Berberis thunbergii) will result in red berries around now, as will winterberry’s (Ilex verticillata) scarlet berries. Juniper’s powder blue berries are “an indispensable food for the birds,” said Mrs Eddison, in addition to being attractive to look at.

For her slide lecture Mrs Eddison used many images that had been taken nearly a decade ago by the Kent-based photographer Karen Bussolini, along with a number of slides Mrs Eddison had taken herself. Many of the images were familiar from the pages of The Unsung Garden. Some featured branches of hornbeam (Carpinus betula) that had been woven into an arbor at Barnard’s Inn Farm, the home of gardener Polly Hill of Martha’s Vineyard.

Others showed the formal herb gardens at Sundial Herb Garden, a privately owned location in Higganum owned by Ragna and Tom Goddard. A scene of one of the gardens covered with a light, powdery snow illustrated the way the geometric shapes of the garden — the rectangles, the circles, the lines of the fence — stand out even in winter.

“She has a garden,” Mrs Eddison said, “that looks gorgeous any time of the year.”

Attendees also saw images from the home of Lynden Miller, an artist and garden designer who is also featured in The Unsung Garden. What Ms Miller does in her garden, Mrs Eddison wrote nearly ten years ago, “she does so well that you don’t know she is doing it.” Lattice panels, the curved arch of a gate, the curve of a perfectly groomed yew hedge, a crabapple tree whose canopy has been pruned into a twiggy umbrella… it’s all tended to carefully yet purposely year-round so that Ms Miller (and her guests) can enjoy the garden “in all weathers and at different times of the year. It is always beautiful.”

Winter is also a good time to do some thinking about one’s own garden.

“It’s time to think about the structure of your garden,” Mrs Eddison said. “You can’t go out and tear everything up, of course, but you can plan for the future. Even I eventually came to realize that I needed bones in my garden.

“I love the fireworks of summer, don’t get me wrong, but I couldn’t live any place where there is no winter. I really couldn’t.”

As we watch the snow fall yet again this week it wouldn’t be wrong to pull out gardening books. It would be all right to settle into a comfortable chair near a window — probably with sweater over the shoulders and a fire roaring nearby — and dream about putting structure into next summer’s garden… to be appreciated next winter.

(Sydney Eddison’s sixth book, Gardens To Go: Creating and Designing Container Gardens, will be published in April.)