Winter gardens can be cool -- and colorful

NEW MARKET, Va. -- Your perennials have gone dormant, leaves are drifting down and the winds blow chill. But there's no need to mourn the passage of another growing season. Snow time can be show time with a winter garden.

By definition, a winter garden does not mean raising orchids in the greenhouse in January, crafting dried blossoms into Christmas wreaths or lining up a half-dozen African violets on the kitchen windowsill.

Contenders all, but winter gardens at the root of this writing are an eye-arresting combination of contrasting colors, unusual textures, seeds and seedpods, shapes and form, and blooms.

"Plants alone do not a winter garden make," writes Sydney Eddison in "The Unsung Season: Gardens & Gardeners in Winter."

"Like the beauty of actress Katharine Hepburn, beauty in the winter season depends on bone structure. While a summer garden may have the beguiling loveliness of an ingenue, all pink complexion and yielding softness, a garden built on the skillful orchestration of structural elements holds up in any season. And in the winter, such a garden comes into its own."

October is a good time for installing a winter landscape -- or at least for planting something to build around in seasons to come.

Start by arranging a few beds or islands of contrasting colors. There's a certain splendor in having tall, ornamental grasses arranged in breeze-driven fashion against an evergreen background.

And who, by the way, says evergreens must be green?

Try contrasting conifers, say some low-lying, silver-blue creeping junipers mixed with an upright golden Hinoki cypress. Add a Dragon's eye pine, with its alternating bands of yellow and green needles.

For texture, select trees with distinctive bark. The river birch, for example, is characterized by an exfoliating bark that varies in color from cinnamon to reddish brown. Planted as a single or in multi-stemmed clumps, it offers shiny green foliage in summer, dull yellow foliage in autumn and a trunk of laid back or peeling bark in winter.

"Be bold," says Ken Twombly, who with his wife, Priscilla, runs Twombly Nursery in Monroe, Conn. "No matter what scale you work on, the key is creating strong contrasts. It's not like gardening in summer, when you can use subtle foliage effects or gentle color groupings."

In 1994, Twombly created what he believes was the first winter garden in the East: a three-quarter-acre meadow that with the use of some reclaimed fill was turned into a demonstration plot.

That came after a botanical visit to Scotland, where the Twomblys were infatuated with the blooms and leaf colors of heath and heather in February.

It nurtured the desire to get something similar going in the States.

"It's a whole development of bringing together plants that have winter interests," says Twombly, who calls himself an avid plant collector.

"I started out as an arborist with a design background," he says. "That combination is working pretty well."

Economically as well as artistically. Twombly says sales have jumped 25 percent to 30 percent per year over the past few years because of the demonstration winter garden. His hottest products, ironically, are items for viewing during the coldest time of the year.

"People get (plant) combinations they wouldn't ordinarily think of," he says. "Everything (in the demonstration garden) is numbered; everything is labeled. It's a sales tool that really took off."

Twombly constantly tinkers with his winter garden, which now includes 23 stand-alone beds reachable by way of self-guided paths bisected by a streambed.

He is liberal with rocks, using them for benches, bridges and small lookouts.

"To me, stones look wonderfully elemental in a winter landscape, and their enduring structure brings a sense of cohesion to my overall design. They provide shape, color and balance."