Winter Wonderland - Spruce-up Curb Appeal With Winter Landscaping

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There is a trend toward property buyers who are attracted to year-round, outdoor visual flair. Regardless of whether you are staging your residence for potential buyers, or yearning a garden that blooms forth in the winter, there are a number of colorful suggestions for creating a winter paradise in your own backyard.

Give some thought to that even though different in tone and hue from electric summer bloomers, there are plants that will bring wonderful color accents to your winter garden.

Witch Hazel is a shrub that has a late autumn to winter bloom. Yellow, gold, orange or red flowers arrive in the winter months. These flowers appear like mini firecrackers .What a way to bring in the festive season!

The Dogwood Arctic Fire is a new species. This smaller dogwood shrub is excellent for smaller gardens and residential landscapes. The long, bold red stems of this dwarf plant make for a marvelous show in the wintertime and the stems are stunning in seasonal arrangements and wreaths.

The Burning Bush is a different 1 with awesome scarlet red color. The deep dark red leaves pretty much glow and the corky wings on the twigs hold winter snow, producing a beautiful outline of the branch's structure.

Japanese pieris is an evergreen shrub that produces lily -of-the-valley like flowers. Bunches of the flowers hang in clusters, like bells ringing in the festive season. The flowers bloom red, white or pink and look gorgeous against the shrub's vibrant green leaves.

Heathers are outstanding sturdy shrubs. Heathers bloom in white, pink, purple and deep reds and offer myriad options for stellar color combinations.

Winter jasmine is a rambling, trainable shrub that blooms lovely yellow jasmine blossoms in late autumn through winter.

Speaking of trainable plants, think of creating a special winter space with hard scape style elements. Rustically developed arbors, gazebos and stone walls add an alluring style element to any winter landscape. You can then train your jasmine or other trainable shrubs to weave around them. This will add an fascinating dynamic in terms of color and height variance. Tall, ornamental grasses also function effectively to soften up and blend your style elements.

Bear in mind that in order to develop the ideal winter garden you should really start off putting your dream into action in the spring and summer months. With some foresight, the ideal combination of winter plants and a couple of design elements, everyone will want to walk through your winter wonderland!

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Collecting Wild Plants For the Landscape

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When a gardener asks me how to collect plants in the wild I'm apt to say "Don't do it."

This answer is not prompted by any view of conservation, but 1 of dollars and cents and labor.

Just figure it out for yourself. For 1, or a couple of plants you drive 20 rough miles into the mountains (40 miles round trip at.75 cents per mile). Then there is the issue of lugging tools and wet sacks a half mile to the location of the plants. Then comes the digging of the plant or plants (why do the "selected" ones at all times grow amongst rocks?) Immediately after the plants are burlapped comes the time to carry them (35 pounds or a lot more) back the half mile to the auto. Just after a hurried trip home the plants are planted and watered. Somehow they normally look a lot a great deal more scraggly when they are out in the open. What is the result? A 50-30% chance that the scraggly plant or plants will survive.

I don't like the odds.

As for me, I'll go to a beneficial nursery and pay 10 to 15 dollars for a well-shaped plant growing on a pruned and active root program. It is already dug, so all I do is take it residence and plant it. The odds? About 95 to 5 that it will never ever show that it has been moved.

For all usual instances that is still my answer.

Those Rare Plants

There are unusual circumstances exactly where collecting is worth the trouble, then again. If you find a unique plant, 1 with unusually large or colorful bloom, superior foliage or one thing of the sort, it may well be worthwhile to bring it into your garden for further observation.

The only catch is that of the chance of losing the plant in transplanting it. With rare plants you just can't afford. 50-50 odds.

Here is a trick for juggling the odds in your favor.

When you have selected your plant, choose how huge a ball of earth you will need to lift with it to give it a very good chance of coming via if it has a great root program. Do not forget that a wild plant just about usually has so wide ranging a program of roots that you can't hope to collect much more than a smaller fraction of it.

Now draw a circle of the selected diameter around the plant. Mark the quadrants of the circle. Now dig a trench around two opposing quadrants. Make the sides straight down to the full depth of the future ball, cutting all roots cleanly.

The trench have to have be only as wide as the digging tool.

Now fill the trench with a light, fluffy mixture of compost ("forest duff") and a little soil.

If you do this in October or November you can then relax until Mareh: Then return and repeat the operation for the other two quadrants.

At the subsequent planting season you can ball this plant, working from the outer edge of the trench. Your plant will have formed a multitude of fine feeding roots in the light back-fill in the trench.

Under such circumstances you must hardly shed a plant in a hundred.

Did I hear you say "That is difficult work?"

It certainly is. I'm sure you will agree that it is too a great deal for any ordinary plant.

Of course, if your plant is as unusual as you feel it is, it's worth it. If not, be lazy like I am. Just let your nurseryman do the function. It's less costly certainly, and it surely saves a lot of spade function.

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