There isn’t much light in winter: maybe that’s why what little sneaks through to us feels like airborne gold. I caught this backlit scene at Courthouse Square on December 12th, around 3pm, the late afternoon light snagging the plumes of Stipa and Calamagrostis grasses. And the shadows were just as beautiful: don’t you love how the cool blue of the winter sky colors the shadows, washing these granite boulders in turquoise?

At times like these, I envy those whose land is open to the sunlight of winter. You get better color in those plants with winter color or berries, such as bergenia, cotoneasters, or snowberries—probably healthier, too—and you get the play of light we shaded ones long for. Above’s a prime example: place plumed or felted plants in the path of the low sun and, at the right time and angle, your frizzy garden will glow in rim-light  (helps to have a dark backdrop in the distance). 

Winter Color in Spring’s Garden

I visited Jaralene Spring’s garden before Christmas and was reminded of the value of good color in bleak weather. Here on drippy afternoon of pure gloom, she toured me down the three paths of her mixed border, where we found plenty of colorful plants almost glowing in the low light.

Jaralene’s house is a nouveau-Victorian built in the early 90s on the slope above Shawnee Beach The site slopes downward to the east, so a sunny day hits it early and hard. She told me that the central tower—home to a hot-tub—gets so hot and humid that she thinks it’s better used as a greenhouse. “I start all my seedlings up there now.”

Looking uphill from the Mixed Border

Looking downhill from the house at the mixed border and the renovated "Coop" that houses Jaralene's art & garden projects

The land below the house had to be carefully terraced and drained, as there is an active spring up behind the house that soaks the ground all the way downslope. On riprap terraces, Jaralene grows some vegetables and about 16′ worth of strawberries in raised-bed cages to hold off the raccoons. The water-lines direct moisture to the lawn below, which is edged with blueberry bushes, their bare branches now cherry-red against the green lawn.

You enter the garden under a homemade willow gate that Jaralene created. The low bank along this flagstone path is planted with carex buchananii and calluna “firefly”, its raspberry foliage studding the path at eight-foot intervals. 

Calluna "firefly" against creeping sedum

Other color elements include (in the photos):

• bugle mixing it up with creeping sedum

• what I believe is a snowberry in its smaller, pink-berried form

• A heather, probably “Springwood White”

• Iris foetidissima, an evergreen iris that doesn’t have much of a flower, but instead sports these bright-orange, multi-berry dangles most of the winter.

One thing Jaralene does well is play one color or texture off another. In one spot, an old chair is placed where its faded paint matches the yellow of black-eyed susans.

In the right photo, that’s a ‘Rose Glow’ barberry wearing nothing but its red berries.

One of my favorite moments of color resonance was this native snowberry, its white berries staccato against that emphatic bleached grass (calamagrostis again?) Note how these plants pick up many of the colors of the renovated “Coop.” 

Jaralene works her artistry in the garden and FROM the garden. Here she is with a Christmas wreath she made of rose hips from a rosa glauca that’s taking over the south fence. Jaralene paints with a brush loaded with plants!