There’s no doubt about it, winter is the most challenging time of the year for the gardener.  There are jobs a plenty that can be done – tidying, planting, landscaping etc. – but often the biggest challenge of all is finding the motivation to get out into the garden in the first place. Glancing whistfully through the kitchen window might be the closest that many come to making meaningful contact with their green plot through the dark months. Certainly the notion of the garden as a 3-season-only attraction is pretty common, and it’s easy to relegate gardens to no-go zones until the lengthening days of spring bring about the long-awaited burst of new growth.

Needless to say it doesn’t have to be this way. Disowning your garden through winter is a bit like saying to yourself that you’ll only use half the rooms in the house for a quarter of the year – in other words, a major waste.

It always seems to me that the key to making the most of the garden in winter is to make it as interesting, changeable and diverse as it would be at any other time of the year. Firstly consider that the season has one pretty appealing benefit to any gardener, namely that most plants don’t grow in any noticeable way, which means there is no weeding or grass-cutting to be done.

This in itself means that time spent outdoors can often more readily be spent enjoying the plants without a nagging sensation that you really should be tackling that on-going round of maintenance tasks.  A dusting – or, as in the case of last year – a deluge of snow can transform the garden into a place of otherworldly beauty, but that’s not what you’d call a reliable or indeed long-lasting draw to the outdoors.

Over the next few blog entries I’m going to be exploring a few of the elements that can be deployed to turn your garden into a jewel-box of winter treasures that will have you as keen to dash outside in January as at any other time of the year.

Our journey through the winter garden starts with my personal favourite horticultural feature of the season; the one that has me, bizarrely perhaps, eagerly awaiting the onset of the cold days and long nights each year. Namely, bark.

Now it’s fair to say that a number (though certainly not all) of the trees and shrubs with interesting bark have this same feature year-round, but the great beauty of winter is to see these radiant stems and peeling trunks displayed naked, leafless and bold in a way that is simply not possible at any other time of the year.

Starting with the biggies; full-sized forest trees may not seem like obvious choices for most gardens, but coppicing, pollarding and formative pruning can allow the benefits of some larger trees to be shared in not so large gardens. Eucalytpus’ are too often planted in wildly inappropriate situations, and have garnered a bad rep as a result.

E. gunii is the species most regularly seen, often in small-ish urban settings, which, given that it can rapidly reach 30 metres or more in height, is really not a trend to encourage, but regular pruning can allow it’s flaking bark to be enjoyed in modest spaces.

There are, however, a number of smaller-growing and often more beautiful Eucalypts that make more natural garden subjects. E. gregsoniana and E. vernicosa generally peak at large-shrub proportions and both offer grey and white flaking bark; E. parvula is only a tad larger and has rough grey bark that peels to reveal golden-yellow layers beneath.  E. subcrenulata is larger again, but the species’ deep orange-red trunk surely make this the most appealing of all the Eucalypts, where space allows.

Betula – the Birches – are probably the single most valuable genus for winter bark. I’m going to enlarge on their considerable possibilities in a future blog, but for now suffice to say that the range of colour and textures that they offer is both exceptionally beautiful and unrivalled amongst hardy trees. The shining white trunks of B. utilis var. jacquemontii are so ubiquitous as to have become a gardening cliché, but they are completely unique and irresistible at this time of the year.

Birch trunks certanly don’t begin and end with “white” though. We’re fortunate enough to have the space for a large-ish collection of Betula here, and the deep, shining, near-black of B. utilis ‘Wakehurst Place Chocolate’, vivid orange of B. albonsinensis ‘Gansu’, and peeling terracotta-pink of B. nigra ‘Wakehurst’ & ‘Cully’ rank amongst my favourites.

Acers are not to be outdone in the winter-wonder stakes. A. griseum (the Paperbark Maple) is a perfect garden tree. Small and slow-growing with massively flaking bark of glossy chestnut red.

It’s close cousin A. triflorum is of similar proportions but with shaggy grey bark. A. palmatum ‘Sango-Kaku’ is the well-known “Coral-Bark” Japanese Maple. Winter reveals a network of vivid red stems that take on a much less colourful appearance throughout the rest of the year. A. palmatum ‘Eddisbury’ is a similar, rather more robust cultivar.

A. x conspicuum ‘Phoenix’ can be tricky to establish but is worth every effort for it’s scarlet stems lined with silver.

This last is one of a multitude of  ”Snake-Bark Maples”, most of which make small to medium sized trees of easy cultivation in the garden. They have trunks in all shades of green to red, lined and striped with silver and white. Very beautiful, particularly when wet. There are a lot to choose from, but the many forms of A. davidii, A. grosseri & A. tegmentosum are all equally fine, as are the hybrids ‘White Tigress’, ‘Silver Cardinal’ & ‘Silver Vein’.

Next up has to be Prunus – the Cherries. Only a few Prunus offer great bark, but the ones that do are all show-stoppers. P. maackii and it’s cultivar ‘Amber Beauty’ have glossy, flaking bark of old gold whilst P. rufa produces shining deep red-brown bark that flakes conspicuously. Best known of all is P. serrula which  has incredibly tactile, deeply polished satin-like bark of mahogany brown. Irresistible.

Stewartia is a genus whose virtues I’ve extolled before in this blog. They are amongst the very best of all small garden trees with an array of virtues and much beauty at any time of the year. Winter, though, brings focus to their python-like flaking trunks that often create a fascinating lattice-work of patterns and colours. S. pseudocamellia and S. sinensis are the most accommodating of the species and both should be planted far more widely than is currently the case.

Shrub wise there are two heavyweights of the winter bark scene whose presence has almost come to define the look of the best gardens at this time of the year.

First up comes Salix alba – the white Willow. Ornamentally speaking this is an almost featureless plant for most of the year , which, if left to it’s own devices, rapidly turns into a substantial tree, but almost no-body who grows it allows it that luxury.

Instead S. alba var. vitellina, with bright yellow stems, and S. alba ‘Britzensis’ with, brilliant orange and scarlet stems, are generally cut back hard every second year  to encourage renewed flushes of the often spectacular new stems.

The other major shrubby contenders, and probably the number one starting point for winter bark colour, are Cornus alba and it’s close cousins C. sericea and the British native Cornus sanguinea. All of these Cornus make sprawling, suckering, vigorous shrubs, but, as with Salix alba, in the garden they give their best displays of bright, fresh stems when cut back hard every few years. C. alba has stems of crimson, and in the cultivar  ’Kesselringii’, almost jet-black ageing to deep, blood-red. C. sericea also has forms with red stems, although none are as effective as those of C. alba, and the cultivars more usually encountered are those with yellow to olive-green stems.

For my money the best of these three shrubby species is undoubtedly Cornus sanguinea – the Blood Cornel. Numerous near-identical named selections have been made – ‘Midwinter Fire’ being the most readily available.

They are pretty shrubs in spring with bronze-red new foliage and again in autumn, when their leaves turn to shades of apricot, but their true glory is revealed after the leaves have fallen when the multi-coloured stems of yellow-orange-scarlet are revealed.

The psychedelic  intensity of colour (particularly when displayed against a dark background) has to be seen to be believed, and should serve to get even the most recalcitrant gardener off their sofas and out into the garden in the very depths of winter.