Winter Garden Decoration

In our country, winter lasts a long time, even too long, so the garden in winter is a matter of special concern for landscape design specialists. If you approach the matter with fiction, a winter garden can be amazingly beautiful with subtle tints of colors against a background of white snow.

In winter, the color of the bark of trees and bushes begins to "play with colors". Our incomparable beauty - white birch - is not lost at all next to the snow-covered trees. It is surprisingly good in combination with evergreen conifers - pine and spruce. The whiteness of its slender trunks is harmoniously complemented by a picturesque crown with thin hanging branches. When the sun is shining, the birch branches covered with hoarfrost create a delicate sparkling lace against the background of the blue sky.

Trees and shrubs with colorful bark are especially good in winter. The weeping shape of a white willow with yellow-brown shoots is very effective, creating a beautiful greenish-yellow tent of branches cascading down to the ground. There are also yellow-barked forms in deren - an unpretentious shrub, which, in my opinion, is even more beautiful in winter than in summer, when its twig-like shoots with shiny bark are covered with leaves. By the way, the deren has varieties with bright green and dark cherry shoots, which look especially advantageous next to conifers.

One of the most beautiful trees in winter is the green-barked maple. It has really green bark, which is dotted with white stripes in young specimens. The view of a striped tree greatly diversifies the picture of the winter garden. An interesting color accent in it can be created by plantings of many species of rose hips, in which the shoots are painted green or purple-brown, yellow acacia with yellow-green bark, the Far Eastern species of bird cherry - bird cherry Maaka - with brown cherry bark and many other plants. And of course, in the winter in the garden you cannot do without conifers, which, with their "eternal" greenery, enliven the slightly colored winter landscape. Spruce wrapped in a snow shawl is especially good. However, slightly powdered pines look no less fabulous. The sight of these plants in the snow gives us the feeling of a winter fairy tale that we have loved so much since childhood.

ANDREY GORODNYANSKY, journalist, landscape designer