HOW’S WINTER shaping up where you are so far or more to the point: How’s the winter garden looking? What’s your view out the window this time of year, and could it be improved with some strategic enhancements, creating a true four-season garden no matter where you are?
That was the subject of a recent chat I had with Warren Leach, the author of a new book called “Plants for the Winter Garden: Perennials, Grasses, Shrubs and Trees to Add Interest in the Cold and Snow.”
Warren, a nurseryman and landscape designer, is based in Rehoboth, Mass., where he and his wife operate Tranquil Lake Nursery. We talked about a range of ideas for enhancing the wintertime scenes in our gardens, from using winter bloomers like witch-hazels (above, ‘Jelena’ as a tree form), to trees with showy bark and more.
Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page to enter to win a copy of his new book. (Author photo below by Mark Pagliarini.)
Read along as you listen to the Jan. 20, 2025 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
winter gardens, with warren leach
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Margaret Roach: How are you, Warren?
Warren Leach: Hi, Margaret. Great.
Margaret: Cold!
Warren: Yes. It’s really winter.
Margaret: Speaking of cold. I know you were, I believe, born and raised in Maine, and for many years you’ve lived in eastern Massachusetts. So was it just being a citizen of the cold-winter zones that kind of got you interested in the subject of winter gardens originally, sort of in self-defense, not wanting to look out the window at blah for five or six months a year?
Warren: Well, yes, because you’re right, winter’s actually five months long in New England if you count the killing frost in November and through March. And making gardens for myself, and as well as for clients, we always look to have interest all year long. And having plants that bloom in the wintertime is just adds magic to the garden.
Margaret: And in the book, they’re not all plants that bloom in the winter. There are plants that do lots of different things structurally and color-wise, including some that bloom in the winter. But there are some that do flower. I don’t know about you, but right now for me, and I’m sort of across the Massachusetts border all the way across into New York State, but a similar zone probably, it’s almost witch-hazel season, which is weird. I don’t think of it 10 years ago, for instance, as being December-January; I think of it as being a little later. And we’re talking not about the native witch-hazel, but about the intermediate Chinese or Asian witch-hazel.
Warren: And also Hamamelis vernalis, the vernal witch-hazel, which is native to the Ozarks. There’s a wonderful cultivar called ‘Amethyst,’ which is a very different color. It is amethyst color as opposed to yellow and orange, which you may think of as other witch-hazels. And that can actually start blooming in January, although the season for witch-hazels, it really varies depending on what the cold and the rain and the climate has been prior to this time of year.
Margaret: Right. And so what color are the ‘Amethyst’ blooms?
Warren: So if you think of the gem amethyst, violet-purple.
Margaret: You’re kidding.
Warren: No, it’s a wonderful color.
Margaret: Oh my goodness. How did I miss that? I could have sworn I went through the whole book [laughter]. Oh my goodness. Well, I’ve got to put that on my wanted list. That sounds exciting.
Warren: And right now I’ve got the Chinese witch-hazel, Hamamelis mollis ‘Wisley Supreme,’ is beginning to come into bloom, and that has large yellow flowers and very fragrant. You can smell it for a hundred feet away.
Margaret: Yes, the fragrance is delightful. And the funny thing is that they’re like tiny little ribbons, almost, the flowers; it’s not that they’re substantial-looking. But if you’ve put your nose up against them, they’re quite lovely—the scent is quite lovely.
Warren: And in mass they show off and they last; the bloom season can be for four or five weeks. On the coldest days, the flowers kind of curl up like little thermostats, and then they unfurl again on warmer winter days. So you have a really long bloom season.
Margaret: One of the things that I find, and sometimes I get aggravated by it, is with some of the ones that I have of the intermediate Asian types, and this is a word that’s also in your book: They’re marcescent. They hold their faded leaves.
Warren: They don’t drop their leaves.
Margaret: And sometimes that looks a little kind of ugly, messy. In some in things it’s very beautiful to me to see, and in other things it’s less so. And so when I’m wanting to look at those beautiful little flowers at this time of year or shortly, if the big leaves are hanging… I forget, but I think maybe ‘Pallida’ is one that I have that is a yellow-flowered one, and I think that one hangs onto theirs. Another one I love, which actually was featured in your book, is ‘Jelena.’ And you had it looking very different from-
Warren: Well, it’s a wonderful warm orange color. And you’re right, some witch-hazels absciss their leaves better than others. And there are cultivars that are known for dropping their leaves and being more attractive in the garden. But I love to have witch-hazels top-grafted as small standard trees, because it allows you to situate other plants underneath them in the garden, and it raises the blooms up even higher.
Margaret: And what do you graft them on to make them do that?
Warren: So they’re grafted on Persian ironwood, which is Parrotia persica [top of page photo]. You can graft plants of related species onto each other. So you can graft witch-hazels on the native witch-hazel, Hamamelis virginiana. But you can also graft on Parrotia.
Margaret: Because most of the ones I have are multi-stemmed almost vase-shaped. They break low, the different stems break low from the base, and they’re on virginiana. They’re grafted onto virginiana. And so I have to always be watching out for some of those naughty rootstock sprouts that come up and want to sort of take over the situation or at least make a mess, or just look ugly.
Warren: And of course, the Parrotia foliage is markedly different than the witch-hazel foliage, so you still have to patrol that graft union, but it’s a lot easier to identify and prune off in the late summer.
Margaret: Wow, that’s a wonderful idea, though. I didn’t know that it could be top-grafted as a tree form onto a different species. But that’s very interesting. And it looked beautiful in the book, and it was new to me, visually new to me. But that one, ‘Jelena,’ I have that right outside beyond my front porch. So it’s like right out the living room window. It’s the first thing I can see in the winter, this time of winter, to come into bloom. And it’s close enough, just at the edge of the porch, that it’s just so inviting and so beautiful and vivid. It’s a wonderful one.
Warren: Well, that’s a good way to think about the winter garden is within views from inside, and also on the way to the front door. So the entry garden is also a prime location for perhaps analyzing your garden and adding things for this winter interest in particular.
Margaret: Right. Early on when I started gardening decades ago here, I added a lot of fruit-bearing things, especially a lot of hollies, deciduous winterberry, the native holly Ilex verticillata. And I have four big groups of 10 or so shrubs each, and they’re gigantic now and so forth. And my belief at the time was that those were going to be my winter-garden view, and I sited them accordingly so that I would see them from certain sight lines of areas of the house that I used in more in the winter and so forth. But the birds had a different idea [laughter].
Warren: Well, yeah, the robins just come in and have a feast.
Margaret: The cedar waxwings—oh my goodness, they went crazy. But fruit, you have a whole section in the book about fruit for winter, and there are some fruits that hold up a little better, I suppose.
Warren: So one that is excellent is the red chokeberry, which is Aronia arbutifolia; the cultivar ‘Brilliantissima’ is particularly nice [above]. So red chokeberry is a native shrub that you would find growing in perhaps a moist meadow on the edge of a woodland, but it’s actually very drought tolerant. And I have sandy soil at Tranquil Lake Nursery. So I’ve been growing drought-tolerant gardens for decades.
Aronia will grow in full sun as well as partial shade. A member of the rose family, so it has white flowers in May, red fall foliage color, but the fruit is very persistent and will last through the winter. It’s not gobbled up by the birds.
Margaret: It’s interesting, the reason, I mean, it’s not sugary-sweet, it’s high in tannins, so it’s not appealing until it’s really, really, really, really, really weathered apparently a lot. Do you know what I mean? It’s not that juicy, succulent, delicious thing eaten fresh, even by birds. So it holds on. Yeah, I have a lot of the black-fruited one, melanocarpa, a lot of old plants of that here. And it’s not a showy, but I enjoy it in season when the fruit’s fresh, and those little white flowers of the Aronias, they attract a lot of pollinators. I mean, they’re really appealing.
Warren: They do. And it’s an upright shrub, so it can be pruned and thinned out. So you can grow other either herbaceous perennials or other woody plants at its base. So it adds that layered effect in the garden.
Margaret: So that’s a fruit that’s going to last a little longer. The red chokeberry.
Sort of in the other direction, there’s some things that have persistent color, like the conifers most obviously. And you have a bunch of different areas of the book that talk about conifers in different ways. You have one section called “The Gestalt of Groves,” and you suggest the idea that we make groves, for instance of a fastigiate conifer, multiples of a fastigiate conifer, for instance, and another chapter just called “Fastigiate Forms.”
So for architecture—or just for color, you have groundcovering conifers, a lot of exceptional uses. One thing I did right in the beginning that the birds didn’t mess around [laughter] with was planting a sort of a hillside slope above my backyard—a difficult spot, a transition zone where it was steep—was planting some groundcovering conifers, including one I think one that you have in the book, the plum yew, Cephalotaxus harringtonia, the prostrate one. It is done so well. And Microbiota also, I forget what we call the common name of that.
Warren: Like Russian Arborvitae.
Margaret: Right. So yeah. So what about some groundcover-y conifers? Because people are always asking for not just herbaceous groundcovers, but-
Warren: No, those are two great, great conifers that are low and spreading. And of course the deer don’t eat the plum yew, they do eat Taxus, of course. My favorite low spreading yew, or Taxus, is Taxus baccata ‘Repandens,’ which has glossy black-green foliage. And it’s just elegant. And especially when situated next to plants that have, or shrubs or small trees that have colorful bark. So whether you had red twig dogwoods like ‘Westonbirt’ with cardinal-red stems next to the dark green yew or a paperbark maple, it’s a great combination.
Margaret: And I think that’s important. Speaking of juxtaposing things consciously really to enhance the effect, I mean those witch-hazel flowers that we were talking about earlier, you make the point in the book, I believe, about having those against a backdrop of something dark green and beautiful like a conifer nearby means that those little beautiful flowers in their various colors really, really stand out even at this time of year, in the lower-light season and so forth.
Warren: And there are some low-growing shrubs with broadleaf evergreen foliage. And one of my favorites, I think it’s underused in New England, although it’s maybe more common, so is sweet box Sarcococca hookeriana humilis. And it also flowers precociously early, sometimes in March. The flowers are small, but they’re sweetly fragrant, and you can step out and have that wonderful scent in the garden. It’s a low, broadleaf evergreen that might look like a very dwarf Leucothoe, only growing about 18 inches high, and great for partial shade.
Margaret: I haven’t grown it, and it’s interesting. I know about it, but I haven’t ever grown it. I didn’t know about the fragrance aspect. That’s great.
Warren: Yeah. It also attracts pollinators. So on warm winter days, whether the witch-hazels are blooming or perhaps hellebores are blooming, there are bees that are out patrolling, looking for pollen and nectar. And so having plants that will bloom in the wintertime or a very late winter, like sweet box, is important for the bee population as well. It’s a plant that I actually have growing in gardens in the Worcester, Massachusetts, area, which is known for being colder, of course, than the coast of Massachusetts and the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut, which we refer to as the banana belt [laughter] where you can grow-
Margaret: That’s a little optimistic, Warren, I think [laughter]. Compared to what?
Warren: Well, compared to Northern New England.
Margaret: Yes, I’m teasing.
Warren: And well, of course John Gwynne at Sakonnet Gardens in Little Compton, Rhode Island, has a great collection of camellias that are just enviable in bloom in December and January.
Margaret: Oh no, absolutely. You mentioned the spreading English yew, the Taxus baccata ‘Repandens.’ And a million years ago—I mean, I don’t know how many decades, a long, long time ago—a friend who had Heronswood Nursery, Dan Hinkley out on the West Coast, the Pacific Northwest, he sent me some of the gold form of that, ‘Repandens Aurea.’
Warren: Oh, wow.
Margaret: And they were in little, it was like their roots were in little sandwich bags with a little ball of soil, almost like less than a 3-inch pot kind of amount of soil tied with a twisty tie or rubber band, like these little balls of soil and these little tiny, maybe 8-inch rooted cuttings, I guess they were. And he sent me a bunch of them. And they’re the size of hippopotamuses, short hippopotamuses, but hippopotamuses nonetheless these days; they’re so big. And they’re only gold in the warm season. They’re not gold at this time of year. They’re dark green.
So ‘Repandens Aurea’ is fantastic. It’s unbelievably beautiful. It’s like a beacon during the growing season. And so that makes me think of gold, and it’s too bad a lot of things that are gold are either herbaceous or deciduous trees and shrubs. I always want that beacon kind of feeling, especially at a distance on an axial view or whatever, even in the winter. And the only thing I have that really does that 100 percent is it’s an Abies. It’s a little Caucasian fir called ‘Golden Spreader,’ I think, Abies nordmanniana is the genus and species. That damn thing is gold, gold, gold, 365 years a year. But you know what I mean? A lot of other things are dulled down in the winter. Do you have any gold in the winter?
Warren: Well, there are some conifers that actually become even more accentuated, the gold color. And one of them is a Pinus virginiana ‘Wates Golden’ [above]. And it, so Pinus virginiana is a tough tree. It’s a small pine, not large. It’s kind of the Southern equivalent of our jack pine in northern New England, which is also very tough. But the foliage, after a hard frost, turns bright yellow and lasts all winter. And it can be a tree that gets to be perhaps 25 feet, but it could be pruned even at something that was more like 15 or 20 feet and kept in scale in a smaller garden.
Margaret: Oh, that’s an interesting one to look up because as I said, I feel like it just gives me such a lift in the lower light season.
Warren: Well, it is the color of sunshine.
Margaret: Yes, exactly.
Warren: And if course there are some herbaceous groundcovers that also are bright gold. One of my favorites is a golden form of sweet flag. So a Japanese sweet flag is Acorus gramineus, and this is the cultivar ‘Ogon, which means gold in Japanese. And so it’s a plant that is mostly associated with moist conditions and bog gardens, but it’s actually very drought-tolerant and very evergreen makes a low groundcover, slow-spreading, about 12 inches high. And the rabbits don’t eat it. And of course, the rabbits have been eating all of the sedges, the Carex, but they don’t touch the Acorus.
Margaret: I’m not a big rabbit lover over here, by the way. [Laughter.] Oh my goodness. They are naughty. They are naughty.
Warren: Well, they’re even eating woody plants to the ground.
Margaret: I know. I know. They make their pristine little cuts. They have very… Their dentition, their teeth, they make those fine, clean cuts.
Warren: At a 45-degree angle.
Margaret: They don’t mutilate something, but they decimate it. You know what I mean? In their very pristine way. Yeah. Not fun. So that’s a good one.
Another thing that I love for the gold are some of the twig or shrub willows and dogwoods that have colorful twigs—that are deciduous and have colorful twigs in the winter. I’m just looking out the window, up the hill here, and there’s this wonderful screaming thing, easy to maintain. It’s just a pollarded Salix alba. I can’t remember which one it is.
Warren: There’s a couple of different forms of Salix alba, and I was recently at Wave Hill in the Bronx, a wonderful public garden, and they had a display of both the willow as well, the shrubby dogwoods, which get coppiced in late winter, early spring, cut practically to the ground. And then they regenerate with wonderful wands of new growth that is brightly colored in the wintertime. [Above, two coppiced Salix alba.]
Margaret: And it’s just amazing, because all you do to maintain these plants—once you have, again, the one I’m talking about is a multistem sort of pollarded, so it’s like maybe five stems that are as tall as I am, but then shooting up on top of those are 10 feet of these bright twigs. It’s Salix ‘Britzensis’ that I have I think, and that’s the coralbark willow or whatever. But yeah, and all you have to do is once a year, like you’re saying, sometime late winter or whatever, is just take off that old colorful stuff—behead it, coppice or pollard it, depending on the level you’re talking about. And boom. Then you have this lovely plant in the growing season. And then this winter gorgeousness.
Warren: There’s another small maple that also has bright yellow stems, and it’s a form of Acer negundo. Acer negundo ‘Winter Lightning.’ And I saw that at the National Arboretum probably about 30 years ago, and had to add it to my plant palette. So it’s a small tree. The boxelder is a small tree and also can be pollarded. Very hardy, zone 3. But this time of year, the stems are egg-yolk yellow, and I have it planted with a white pine in the background. So it really shows off.
Margaret: So you said something earlier on kind of about how we should be conscious and think about the areas of the garden that we do view at this time of year. We may not be all over the place, but the entryway, the front garden.
Like I was just talking about my willow, the axial views from key windows where we do sit or… So how about some guidance from your designer self? We’ve been talking plants, plants, plants, but your designer self, kind of building on what you said earlier about that if people or a client wants to enhance their winter garden, and you sort of take that walk around, what are you asking about, and thinking about, looking for? What’s the guidance?
Warren: Well, there’s some choice, small-scale trees that a lot will fit into fairly small landscapes and even fairly close to the house. So Stewartia pseudocamellia with its wonderful mottled bark. Of course it has camellia-like flowers that bloom the 4th of July. But the winter aspect of stewartias are what you grow them for. Wonderful bark [above].
Also paperbark maple, Acer griseum. And if you site it with a west exposure, so you have it backlit in the late afternoon in the winter garden, the exfoliating bark glows like embers.
The other thing is we’ve talked about is evergreens. So combining green plants on the ground plane, and it could be as simple as Pachysandra terminalis. Sometime it is frowned upon as being too common, but the cultivar ‘Green Sheen’ has lacquered leaves. And that was actually selected by a Connecticut nurseryman, Dale Chapman, years ago. And ‘Green Sheen’ is luxurious as a groundcover, a tough groundcover in dry shade. So if you had a Stewartia and you underplanted it with something as simple as Pachysandra and then perhaps had another low-growing conifer or holly next to it, you’re building that composition.
Margaret: And the key with that is if you’re going to use ‘Green Sheen’ or any Pachysandra, you’ve got to be… As Marco Stufano, who founded the gardens at Wave Hill, said to me a million years ago when I was lamenting some plant that was escaping its boundaries, he said, “Who has the shovel, Margaret, you or the plant?” [Laughter.] Yes, he gives me a lot of that baloney all the time. But yes, you could grow a little of that plant, but it should stay under that Stewartia, because it’s a terrible invasive that will run up trees in the woods if you’re adjacent to woodlands, things like that. So we have to be conscious. We have to utilize it and maintain, be responsible for maintaining it. Yeah.
Warren: But in a small city garden it-
Margaret: Yes, yes, that’s what I’m saying. It’s like we have to use it ethically.
Warren: Yes. And of course, plants that bloom in the wintertime, again, besides witch-hazels: Mahonia bealyi [above], which is the leather-leaf mahonia, is coming into bloom now, sometimes blooming even the end of December. And the flower buds sometimes don’t open fully, but will hold and then continue to open throughout the winter with the kind of a fireworks shaped inflorescence of yellow bell-like flowers.
Margaret: Speaking of things that get invasive, in the Southeastern and Southern United States, that one’s proven to be a woodland invader, too. So it works for us. And this is where in each choice of a plant, whatever plant we’re talking about, winter-interest or otherwise, we all have to do our homework depending on where we garden and how we garden, right?
Warren: Yes.
Margaret: Yeah. But the Mahonias, and that’s a Chinese species, but there are some, I believe Pacific Northwest species as well. The Mahonias are an interesting group of plants.
Well, we’ve run out of time [laughter], but I’m glad to speak to you and meet you, Warren. Thank you very much. And congratulations again on the book. I’ll talk to you again soon, I hope.
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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 15th year in March 2024. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Jan. 20, 2025 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
