Seeing Red in the Winter Garden

November 3, 2015 | By webadmin

Feeling unimpressed by your winter landscape? Without some special consideration for what the landscape will look like during our cold months, you can often be left with a bare and uncolorful space. By choosing certain evergreen shrubs you can keep your garden filled with color and texture, even through winter months.  Why not try plants that offer blooms, berries, foliage and even branches in shades of red in the landscape?

Pyracantha is a real show-off come fall and winter. Its bright red berries are not only visually stunning, but adept at attracting birds to your landscape. This large shrub has small, dark green foliage that is a perfect complement to the cascades of intense red berries in winter. In spring, white flowers attract butterflies and pollinating bees. This is a large specimen, so it’s best placed at the corners of a home as an accent where it can spread and show off. Plants can grow to 18-ft tall. Plant in full sun to afternoon shade.

Japanese Maple ‘Coral Bark’: We love Japanese maples for their delicate foliage and interesting fall color, but once those leaves drop for the winter, you are rewarded with a shape that is refined and architectural. ‘Coral Bark’ is especially lovely in the winter landscape because as the days get cooler, the bark turns a brighter red. Plant Japanese maples in shade so that one summer returns, trees don’t scorch.

Yaupon Holly: Plants that feature berries through winter not only offer vibrant color in your landscape, but they also feed the local wildlife and birds. Yaupon holly is one of our favorite shrubs or small trees that offer evergreen foliage, but also produce tons of bright red berries in fall and winter. Other holly varieties to consider are Burford Holly and Holly ‘Nellie R. Stevens’.

Nandina shrubs are a classic that never goes out of style as far as we’re concerned. And while there are an endless variety of sizes and shapes of nandina to choose from, one feature most all of them have in common is their fall and winter foliage color that brightens as the weather cools. Varieties such as ‘Firepower’ and ‘Obsession’ are great choices.