Winter gardens as exciting as summer

What about poor, neglected winter?

It's tempting to stay indoors when it's cold outside. But winter is the best time to do serious garden maintenance — cutting back, composting and soil preparation. What better reason to venture outside and plough on with those important tasks than having a garden full of fragrance and beauty?

We tend to think of the garden as being ‘dead’ in winter. This is not the case. ‘Winter’, in the European sense, is non-existent in northern Australia. In southern Australia we experience just a few bleak weeks in June before nature comes to life again. Most of what we call ‘winter’, British gardeners would think of as early spring. To them, it’s ‘daffodil time’.

The biggest pulse of growth and activity in the southern Australian bush occurs during what the calendar calls late winter-to-early spring. Native Orchids, Lilies, Wattles and Grevilleas bloom. Birds return from their wintering grounds to establish territories. Once you get your eye in, the bush is bustling. Tim Entwisle coined the ingenious term ‘sprinter’ for this season (Use it! You will see your world differently).

In gardens, we need to work a little harder to have beauty in wintertime than during the warmer seasons. Creating dense swathes of colour is easy in summer, but in winter we have to be grateful for whatever interest we can get. We need to look through different eyes. Shape and texture take on greater visual importance than colour. Evergreen foliage, bark, thorns and seed pods become as interesting as flowers. What few flowers there are seem all the more poignant, and fragrance feels all the more luxurious.

My own garden is no less interesting in winter than in summer. Plants which shrank from view during summer now step into the limelight.
Osier dogwoods (Cornus stolonifera ‘Flaviramea’) transform from nondescript leafy blobs into phalanxes of luminous yellow twigs. Grey Euphorbias, little more than filler between more interesting plants during the summer, erupt into acid green froth, just when that refreshing colour is most welcome.

Evergreen shrubs such as Aucuba and Skimmia, suddenly make an impression with their bold, glossy leaves. Bergenia ‘Morgenröte’, which has apple-green foliage in summer, suddenly turns beetroot red after a frost. The paperbark maple (Acer griseum) exfoliates bark in curls like copper sheet. Olive-green boughs of Rosa ‘Geranium’ drip with seal-red, flask-shaped hips for as long as the rosellas allow.

There are flowers in my garden, too, but you have to look more closely to see them. Or follow your nose.

Winter boxes (Sarcococca species) have insignificant flowers like grains of rice. They hide under the glossy evergreen foliage, but their rich perfume carries for many metres. Wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox) is an unprepossessing shrub in leaf. But in June its beeswax-coloured flowers are exquisitely fragrant, glowing in the morning sun on leafless branches. I make every excuse to work near my wintersweets on sunny days.

Mahonia bealei bears dangling trusses of yellow bells which smell exactly like lily-of-the-valley. Daphne bholua is taller than its better-known cousin D. odora, and thrives in hotter positions. It flowers six weeks earlier, too, and smells of hyacinths. I grow it by my front door.

Down at ground level, shy bulbs peek from the mulch from the winter solstice onwards. Galanthus, Eranthis, Crocus tommasinianus and Cyclamen coum are followed by moody black, slate and purple hellebores in July.

None of this happened by accident, of course. It takes patience and planning to make a winter garden.

Winter-flowering bulbs are sold during their summer dormancy. It's easy to forget to buy and plant them during the summer holiday madness. But in doing so we deprive ourselves of their beauty for another year. Unlike bulbs, trees and shrubs take time to achieve their full glory, which puts some people off planting them in the first place. Why procrastinate? The sooner we get started planting a winter garden, the sooner we have something to show for it.

Some plants look great all year round. Astelia chathamica from New Zealand is one such plant, with its startling silver swords. Bamboos are another. I grow seven kinds of bamboo, including two voracious Phyllostachys runners. Don't be frightened of bamboos. As long as you understand their growth cycle, which is completely predictable, they are not difficult to keep in bounds. As Stephen Ryan once told me, he spends more time mowing his tiny lawn every year than he does controlling his enormous bamboos.

In my food garden, winter is a time of austerity, but not poverty. In my climate, I sow winter crops in late summer, which seems bonkers at the time. But if I don't I know I'll have nothing fresh to eat in winter. Daikon, komatsuna, carrots and turnips are my staple varieties, being versatile and holding well in the ground until spring. Spinach and sprouting broccoli produce well until the winter solstice, when they grind to a halt. During the shortest days, corn salad is the only thing that keeps growing. It’s a little bland, but you've got to love anything crunchy and green at that time of year. As soon as the days start lengthening, the brassicas resume growth. Naturally there is no fruit in the garden in winter, but my fridge is full of heritage pears and apples, in addition to whatever fruit got preserved during autumn.

I live a very frugal existence. I shifted my recycled 1930s weatherboard house to the country from Melbourne with the idea of having it fully restored after a year or two. Eleven years later, it's still little more than a glorified garden shed.
Luckily, I measure my riches in day-to-day pleasures; in having the luxury of time to follow up my gardening ideas, grow and cook food for my loved ones, and pursue my many interests. I have all the fruit and vegetables I can eat from an area just 10x14m, and flowers to cheer me up when the weather is gloomy. If life has taught me anything, it is that when you have a garden, frugality is no obstacle to wealth at any time of the year.