Winter Gardens

The etched beauty of winter doesn’t find its typical snowshoe footing in southern California, but I have been surprised since I arrived mid-December at how chilly it can get. In LA, it’s never cold enough for the heavy coat I left in New York, though I’m told that in the mountains it can be. We will know about that later this month when we take a long weekend in wine country for my birthday. Down here in LA, even if most days have been sunny enough to open the windows, the setting sun is as much the cue to close the windows as it is to uncork the wine. Other than some gray drizzly days, that’s the extent of winter in LA as I’m experiencing it. As I read reports of snow and ice in New York, I confess I not only empathize with my family and friends battling Old Man Winter in the northeast, but that I kind of miss winter. I doubt I would say that if I was enduring blistering winds on a MTA platform, but after so many years of snow days, I do miss evenings – even entire weekends – of bundling up in an apartment I’ve worked years to make cozy.

Even as a child, I had a veneration of snow that bordered on magical. We didn’t see it much where I grew up, but I had a bottomless appetite for images both moving and still of snow scenes. Then as now, I equate snow with the deep spiritual stillness of a winter forest.  I design with earth tones, and one of my favorite color combinations is green and white. I inherited this palette from my grandmother, whose Oklahoma home used these colors from the flower boxes to the bedding. To my grandmother, it evoked spring tenderlings, but to me, green and white speak to the winter forest. A Christmas tree is one way of bringing the winter forest into the home, but it is not the only way. From scales as grand as solariums to as intimate as terrariums, winter gardens are a dedicated and beautiful way of celebrating winter growth by bringing the winter forest indoors.

Historically, that indoors may have been a conservatory, a large glass enclosure attached to a noble person’s home to be used for cultivating plant life, family life and community life. Many plants were grown in conservatories, but a special practice evolved of cultivating tropical and sub-tropical plantings in conservatory. Plants from citrus to herbs, from palms to bromeliads could flourish in the conservatory, even during the cold season. This kind of winter gardening became a highly specialized practice. The aesthetic was to evoke summertime climes in contrast to the wintertime landscape, with the former possible because of the glass structure and the latter both crowding in on it and clearly visible through it. To appreciate this kind of winter garden was to appreciate the contrast, as well as the luxury, of the experience.

Winter gardening may have begun in the conservatory, and in many botanical gardens and historic homes it continues there, but contemporary winter gardening is not solely a pursuit of privilege. Anyone who does it knows that gardeners are both generalists and specialists. We all love to grow, and we share that love amongst ourselves, with the public, and most importantly with our green charges themselves. But we all have families of plants or practices of growing that we feel a special affinity for. Among gardeners, there is every kind of specialist from cacti and succulent to moss and lichen, from roses to African violets to ferns to herbs, from high country to water. The list of specialties is virtually endless. It encompasses both technique and type, and it includes winter gardeners.

In northern climates, winter gardens are often cultivated outdoors, as paths winding through conifers and other winter plants on grounds public, semi-public and private. One famous public winter garden is the New York Botanical Garden’s conifer arboretum which, though it is cultivated all year, is known for its winter splendor. Private landscapers often create this kind of winter garden as yard plantings of evergreens including determined pine, abundant spruce and playful holly. We associate these winter gardens with climates that get ice and snow, but these gardens are also important in the sunbelt. In southern California, many residential streets are landscaped with evergreens, and just as it is a local custom to pick a lemon or orange from a streetside tree, it is one for hikers along evergreen routes to rub their fingers with the wintery essential oils from juniper and desert sage. Just look at their name: evergreens are a promise. By staying ever green, they remind us both that winter beauty is spectacular, and that no matter how short the days are, spring is never really that far away.

Another type of outdoor winter gardening is winter vegetable gardening. These winter gardeners grow vegetables for family or local consumption using cold frames and other cold climate techniques. There are numerous winter hearty cultivars for this kind of winter garden, but it is not necessary to focus exclusively on those. While some species are simply not suitable for growing during cold weather, many are. These include leafy greens including many lettuces; tubers and root vegetables including potatoes, beets, carrots and parsnips; crustaceous vegetables including broccoli and cauliflower; and garlic, onions and beans. This kind of winter gardening is specific to your USDA hardiness zone, and is popular enough that there should be local resources to support it. If you are interested, browse the shelves at the local library, whose gardening section almost certainly is oriented towards your hardiness zone, and where this popular form of gardening should be represented. Speaking of municipal resources, both the county extension and the local garden club should offer advice and classes regarding winter gardening in your hardiness zone, and some will even provide cuttings or seeds.

Depending on your hardiness zone, any plants you grow indoors arguably constitute a winter garden. The majesty of the public winter garden achieves private pride with the winter garden you cultivate in your home. Many winter plants are suited to terrarium life, but that it not the only kind of indoor winter garden. Many bonsai gardeners grow evergreens, and windowsill gardens house anything from the lettuces of the outdoor cold box to herbs, berries, even grains. Caring for the poinsettia, amaryllis, narcissus and Christmas cactus of the holiday season just passed is a form of winter gardening. So are the practices, during the mid-winter holidays that are on the ascendant, of potting fruit trees and setting seeds for spring.

My favorite indoor winter garden is the winter container garden of white and silver plants contrasted against green. Many winter plants can grow indoors, including holly and some dwarf evergreens, but you will need to be attentive to the specific water and light care that these plants require. Of the dwarf evergreens, an indoor favorite is Norfolk Island pine. Some silver, silver-white or silver-green plants that are typically used for ground cover outdoors can be heartened off for indoor container growth in the right conditions. These include Snow-in-Summer and dianthus. Pots of these arranged with potted painted fern or lamb’s ear or with forced white bulbs such as narcissus or crocus evoke the winter landscape of growth focused through austerity.

Herbs can be friendly to indoor growing. Some that contrast silver or silver-gray against gray-green or deep green are thistle, rosemary and curry plant. Many sages are hearty for indoor container growth. Your local garden club or home center will almost certainly offer sages that can grow in your hardiness zone. Be sure to ask for sages that agree with indoor cultivation, and when you’re placing them, remember that they require bright and dry conditions. The classic silver foliage plant both indoors and outdoors is dusty miller; it is easy to care for and very hearty. Finally, anyone who knows me knows that one of my favorite plants is artemisia. This plant is used for everything from ground cover to making Absinthe. It can be tricky to grow indoors but once you get a strong plant going and provided no one in your household, including other plants or pets, might be affected by the low levels of aroma that it can emit, a well-cared for artemisia will deliver articulated silver-green fronds along with the cachet of growing wormwood.

It’s a cliché but it’s true: when we welcome plants into our homes, we are bringing the outdoors into the home. In our urban homes, the plants we care for are members of our family. Their containers are their homes just as surely as the rooms into which they are placed are their neighborhoods. We place plants so that they can thrive not only from their obvious need and right to the correct levels of light, water, food and traffic but so that they are comfortable in the room itself. In our caring as we bring the outdoors indoors, we harken back to the conservatory, where replicating the plants' ideal growing conditions was as important a duty on behalf of the plants as their presence was beneficial to human caretakers and admirers.

Winter gardens connect us and the plants with the rhythms of nature itself. Both the plants and the people flourish through communion during the few precious hours of winter sunlight. Our shared experience is the knowing of winter’s gift as the daily allotment of sunlight lengthens a few minutes each day after the solstice. It sounds like a stretch, but it’s not by accident that the conservatory that encourages gardening shares its name with the conservatory that encourages music. Both evolved from and were targeted at the same goal: the care of that which produced vitality and beauty in response to the careful, caring act of cultivation.