Christmas gardens - a Christmas wall
We don't plan our gardens for Christmas, do we? In fact, if you asked a thousand gardeners in the UK I don't imagine even one would mention Christmas in the list of things that they'd taken into account when laying out their garden and choosing their plants - and do you know what? They're missing a really big trick! There are three reasons to plant with Christmas in mind:
- To have material to make gifts
- To have plants to decorate your house in the festive season
- To have a place to throw a party!
To begin with, find a space that you can devote to Christmas - for many people this will be a wall or fence that faces the windows of the house. Now you need to plant this area to be beautiful enough in the cold to persuade people to come to an outdoor party just to admire it, and to give you the plants and leaves and berries that you can use to make your house lovely and your gifts seasonal.
Start with pyracantha, an evergreen shrub you can train up the wall and which bears huge clusters of red, orange or yellow berries from November to February, great for cutting and using in flower arrangements. Now plant the garrya elliptica, another tall wall plant which has catkins from early winter to early spring, which look lovely in vases. Rosemary is a good shrub for the lower areas, with its handsome spikes and you can make herb bags or rosemary flavoured oil to give away. Iris unguicaularis might be ugly to say, but it's the winter flowering iris and if you're lucky you'll find its lovely pale blue flowers shoving themselves up in the middle of winter.
Christmas Articles
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