When planning garden and landscape design, we often focus on spring, summer, and fall blooms, but forget about the seasonal interest of winter! Having pretty plants to look at year-round—even when there’s a foot of snow on the ground—makes time spent at home much more pleasant. We have plenty of gorgeous plants to add seasonal interest through winter for a supremely scenic landscape that never fails to impress.
Add These Gorgeous Landscape Plants for Seasonal Winter Interest
The bleak midwinter is much less dreary when your landscape is full of beautiful plants! These are some perennial plants and shrubs that will bring endless colour and seasonal interest to your garden throughout the year.
Red Osier Dogwood
Dogwood shrubs and trees are typically known for their gorgeous spring and summer blooms, but Red Osier is genuinely in a league of its own. A candy apple red bark that persists throughout the winter, its vibrant colour contrasts beautifully with snowy white!
Red Osier dogwood reaches 6–9 feet high and 8–12 feet wide at maturity—a voluminous shrub that can serve many functions in the landscape. Beautify your home by using it for front window privacy, borders and foundation planting, or a single statement plant in the yard.
Ornamental Grasses
Though they lose their colour and die back in winter, most ornamental grasses will still stand tall after the snow falls. They look lovely dancing on the cold December breeze with their tufted, feathery blooms! A popular practice is to plant ornamental grasses in a row to provide structure and division in the landscape without completely obstructing the view. It’s like a wispy sheer curtain to divide up “rooms” in the yard.
Here are some of our favourite ornamental grasses for winter seasonal interest:
- Big Bluestem
- “Karl Foerster” Feather Reed Grass
- Blue Oat Grass
- Bottlebrush Grass
- Silver Feather Maiden Grass
- Switchgrass
Evergreen Shrubs
Nothing brings year-round seasonal colour quite like an evergreen! There are endless varieties with unique textures, tones, and shapes to add to your landscape. Broadleaf evergreens, like boxwood, keep their flat glossy leaves throughout the year, while needled evergreens introduce a classic winter wonderland aesthetic. Plant them along borders, in containers and ornamental urns, or wherever else they’ll get enough sun to stay lush and green!
Snowberry
This North American native shrub bears clusters of berries like small grapes in shades of white and pink. Its berries remain through winter, adding plenty of interest to the landscape, even after its foliage has fallen. You’ll love its subtle, minty vanilla scent! The berries are poisonous to humans, but our local birds can’t resist them, so planting snowberry shrubs will help support our Ontario wildlife in winter when food is scarce for our local animals.
Hardy Holly
Not all holly varieties are hardy to Ontario, but many beautiful cultivars add colour and texture with their signature serrated leaves. To encourage your holly plant to produce its bright, colourful berries, you’ll likely need to plant a male and female shrub near each other. We particularly love Scallywag holly—it has pink and red contrasting borders throughout its emerald green foliage, bringing a whimsical colour to the winter scenery.
Wintercreeper
This seasonal winter beauty is often grown as a vining ground cover or wall-climber but can also be grown as a shrub. Variegated varieties offer exceptional seasonal interest-depending on the variety, the plant can even feature gold or silver highlights! Try training your wintercreeper to climb up the façade of your house! It adds so much drama and romance to your landscape design.
Bala & Port Carling Garden Centre is your one-stop shop for spring, summer, fall, and winter seasonal plants in Ontario. Visit us soon to snag some gorgeous new plants before the ground freezes!
