'Hot' stems warm a cold winter garden

Maybe it's because red, yellow and orange are the colors of fire that they are so appealing in winter.

For whatever reason, these colors are a welcome winter sight, one that is especially pretty -- and warming -- against a backdrop of lily-white snow. With flowers and fall color long gone, we can now enjoy these colors from bark.

Shrubby dogwoods offer some of the hottest bark colors in the plant kingdom. Particularly bright are the stems of Tartarian dogwood and red osier dogwood. For hot, red stems, there's the cherry red color of the varieties cardinal and isanti, the coral red of sibirica, and the blood red of cheyenne. Take your pick. There are a few varieties of white willow whose stems are colorful in winter. Grow the variety britzensis, sometimes called chermesina, if you want to see red when it's cold outside.

For the hottest of fires, yellow and orange are also needed. We could stay with the dogwoods, just by growing, for example, a variety of red osier dogwood like flaviramea, which has bright yellow stems. Golden willow, yet another variety of white willow, offers a spectrum of hot colors on a single plant. Stems are yellowest near the oldest portions, then become orange and finally reddish towards the tips.

The brightest stems on all these plants are on the youngest wood, so the plants need severe, annual pruning to stimulate vigorous growth of new shoots. The procedure is brutal, yet simple: Lop the whole plant, or a good portion of it, to within a few inches of the ground in spring just as the buds are swelling. If this seems too brutal, you can leave a portion of older stems intact each year. Just make sure to cut those stems back the following spring so that the plant never accumulates old wood.

You could be even less brutal and create a different effect by getting those colorful stems up on a leg. Leave some lengths of older stems, or a single trunk, as the point of origin for the colorful, young stems. Each year lop all young stems back to the top of those older stems or trunk.

To coax the best color, these plants also need to be sited appropriately. Give them a good soil to promote that vigorous new growth each year. Another ingredient in the recipe for the very brightest stems is strong sunlight.

Nature supplies the final ingredient: cold temperatures. And the colder the weather, the hotter the stem color.