Year-round interest

It's possible to fill your garden with plants that provide interesting flowers or foliage throughout the year, says Arthur Hellyer, VMH, as he reveals some of his favourites

- Arthur Hellyer

IT is possible to have lots of colour throughout the garden for seven or eight months of the year, but it is costly and few amateur gardeners attempt it nowadays. This is something best left to the public parks and to those large gardens that open more or less permanently as a public spectacle. But this does not mean that continuity of interest cannot be maintained even in very small gardens. It is in the early stages of planning that the foundations of this continuity should be laid.

First, there is the very important matter of choosing the right shrubs, for these will be there all year. Even in winter they add something to the garden scene, the deciduous kinds with a tracery of branches and twigs, sometimes with their own distinctive colouring, and the evergreens with form and colour that stand out due to the absence of foliage elsewhere.

Making use of conifers 

A few conifers are particularly useful in winter and there is no reason why they should not be included, even in a small garden, since there are plenty of kinds that either keep small or are restricted to a narrowly columnar habit that does not interfere with other plants.

The Irish yew and the Irish juniper are both columnar, and the yew is available in both golden-leaved and dark-green-leaved forms, which makes it particularly useful. There is also a very attractive form of Lawson cypress, Chamaecyparis lawsoniana ‘Columnaris Glauca’, which makes a particularly narrow column of dark blue-grey foliage, and another, C.l. ‘Fletcheri’, which is broader, shorter, more feathery and lighter in colour.