I’ve been struck recently by how many gardens are holding winter light shows.  They used to be quite rare events but nowadays everyone seems to be getting in on the act. They showcase gardens and plants in a very different way but, of course, equally are a good money-making venture.  They are surprisingly popular and usually sell out quickly.

It’s not that there aren’t lots of references and even books about gardening in winter – there are –  but most on-line searches looking for “winter gardens” generally only  give results about  giant Victorian conservatories or list nice places to go for a winter stroll rather than those that have been created specifically to make the most of  the season. A good first point of call for most garden subjects is Patrick Taylor’s Oxford Companion to the Garden, but I was surprised to find  no entry for them. So where to look next?

 

In the Winter Garden, Cambridge University Botanic Gardens

Winter with its ability to reveal a garden’s structure  hasn’t always been popular. In the mid-18thc for example,  William Shenstone of The Leasowes  had clearly no love whatsoever for its effects on his garden. One of his Disconnected Thoughts was: “To see one’s urns, obelisks and waterfalls laid open; the nakedness of our beloved mistresses, the naiads and dryads, exposed by that ruffian winter to universal observation, is a severity scarcely to be supported by the help of blazing hearths, cheerful companions and a bottle of the most grateful burgundy.” However it’s worth noting that Maria Jackson in her 1797  Botanical Dialogues, aimed at children,  makes several comments on the beauty of various plants in winter including mosses, lichens, ferns and fungi “which together furnish the botanist with a complete winter garden.”

The Winter Garden in Cambridge Botanic Gardens 

 

It was our old friend John Claudius Loudon who seems to be the first to suggest a garden specifically for plants of winter interest. Sadly there’s no plan or engraving  but as early as 1806,  he proposed that “a winter garden should contain such trees, shrubs, plants, &c. as are in perfection, or retain their verdure, during this season; such as most of the evergreen tribe; and several flowering plants, as aconite, Christmas-rose, &c. They should be grouped and arranged in the natural manner, and a dry gravel walk should be conducted throughout the whole. This garden should be situated near the mansion, in order that it may be conveniently and comfortably approached in the winter.” 

A check through Biodiversity Heritage Library catalogue for the rest of 19thc revealed very little specifically about creating a winter garden apart from a section on Winter by Vicary Gibbs in Garden Colour of 1895.  Much is revealed  about his presumed audience from the opening sentence: “Considering how many people in England spend the Autumn and the Winter in their country homes and the Spring and the Summer in London it is curious that more pains are not taken to plant trees and shrubs which are at their best during the later season of the year.”  

However, social snobbery aside, he goes on to suggest suitable plants “and the way they should be treated.”  Gibbs is also clear that the best effects do not require exotic plants but can be obtained “by quite cheap and common stuff if properly handled.”   Unfortunately what then follows is just 20 or so pages of plants with brief cultivation hints but no suggestions as to how they might be combined or used to create a winter border or garden… and despite the book having about 50 colour plates there are none at all  to illustrate his chapter.

Gertrude Jekyll was next to look at the possibilities, in a short but again unillustrated chapter of Colour in the  Flower Garden written in 1908.  Advocating the use of “a good selection of small trees with coloured bark.” she  recommends “Red Dogwood and some of the willows” before adding that “this planting for colour of bright-barked trees is no new thing, for something like half a century ago the late Lord Somers, at Eastnor Castle near Malvern, used to “paint his woods,” in this way. She goes on to outline a plan for a winter walk at  her own Munstead “beyond the home garden and partly wooded old shrubbery” where “there is a little valley  running up into a fir-wooded hill” and she lists the plants that she had, or wanted to have there. It included some which we might not instantly regard as of “winter interest” such as cistus  which “in all mild winter days” she valued  for “giving off their strong cordial smell”. She also saw the advantages of being able to take in the view from the hillside across “the purples and greys of the leafless woodland of the middle distance” which “have a beauty that no summer landscape can show”.  What I can’t see is any sign that she actually created the walk.

I had high hopes that I tracked down the start of interest when I found David Fish’s Book of the Winter Garden, which came out in 1912. It was part of a series of handbooks of practical gardening published by Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh where Fish worked.  The book was written, he said, “to call attention to the principal winter-flowering plants, and also those plants valuable in the open, for their fruit, foliage, or stem effect. After the fall of the autumn leaf, and the waning of the fêted chrysanthemums under glass, many gardens are ill furnished with attractions. This should not be, seeing that good material is obtainable, which, if treated aright, will prove most satisfactory.” But it isn’t a plea for a specific garden for winter but simply  a fairly comprehensive list of trees, shrubs herbaceous plants and winter bedding, as well plants for the glasshouse.

 

It’s not really until after the Second World War that the idea of winter gardening seems to attract serious interest from garden writers and designers.  Vita Sackville-West wrote a long section in a very long and rather turgid poem about it in 1946

Gardener, if you listen, listen well:
Plant for your winter pleasure, when the months
Dishearten; plant to find a fragile note
Touched from the brittle violin of frost 

However its not until  1948 that Stanley Whitehead, a prolific but now long-forgotten garden writer,  really started the ball rolling by publishing The Winter Garden, which unfortunately is unobtainable digitally and almost as unobtainable in print. In it he asked if we are “too ready to write off winter as a lost season?”  He suggests part of the reason for this is because most plants of winter interest were comparatively recent introductions. Taking the idea of planning for winter effect seriously he devotes  an early chapter to the subject, arguing that in many ways it needs to be better designed  than a summer garden because its structure is laid bare and errors of design were thus blindingly obvious.

 

Meanwhile John Gilmour, then director of Cambridge University Botanic Garden, was thinking about laying out an area for winter interest. This was planted up  as a rather formal narrow  strip in 1951. Although it has now been redeveloped,  it was the inspiration behind the opening in 1979 of a much bigger area dedicated solely to plants offering ornamental winter interest, the first ever  in a British botanic garden.  

For more on the history of the Winter Gardens at Cambridge see this post from their blog.

As far as I can see the first attempt at a planned winter border for its own sake was  Graham Stuart Thomas’s work at Polesden Lacey, a far cry from the rose gardens and herbaceous borders for which he is renowned.  As the National Trust says the small Winter Garden there “is an iconic example of the sheer breadth of his creative vision… and blooms with vibrant colour and fragrance during the coldest months of the year.” Thomas followed it up in 1957 up with  Colour In The Winter Garden which includes two planting plans for small winter borders.

Despite this it’s probably not for another 10 years that the ornamental winter garden idea properly begins to take off. The place where it started was Bressingham in Norfolk, home of the Bloom family nursery and gardens which, until then, had specialised in perennials.  Adrian Bloom joined  the business in 1962 and trying to make a distinctive contribution decided to look for a group of plants that were not already well represented in their catalogue. He chose conifers – particularly those suitable for suburban gardens and by 1967 he had over 200 varieties – and 20 yrs later there were nearly a million growing in his own garden and nursery at Foggy Bottom  in 1000 varieties.  

At first these were intermixed with other plants and then he started experimenting on a  small-scale with beds of silver birch, dwarf conifers, heathers and some basic winter perennials planted together. This led on, from 1967 onwards, to larger beds and borders and the use of a wider range of trees and shrubs.

The gardens featured from time to time on BBC Gardener’s World and I suspect the big breakthrough in identifying the winter garden as a standalone feature was Bloom’s appearance on Gardener’s World in 1991 with Stefan Buczacki, looking at winter flowers. The following weekend the garden had 6000 visitors. As Bloom said  “the power of television is amazing but so is the lift that plants in all their beauty and drama can bring.”  It was to lead him, in 1993,  to  write Winter Garden Glory packed with colourful photographs to prove his point.

from Robin Lane Fox’s article on Cambridge Botanic’s Winter Garden, Financial Times 9th March 2018

Meanwhile Cambridge University Botanic Gardens had created their now famous winter garden starting in 1979 –  the first botanic garden in the UK to dedicate such a large area solely to plants offering ornamental winter interest. It  was designed in the late 1970s by CUBG’s then superintendent, Peter Orriss and supervisor Norman Villis.

This has gone from strength to strength over years as it has matured and now the scent of the massed plantings of scented shrubs, notably Daphne bholua “Jacqueline Postill” assails the visitor long before the Winter garden is even seen.

 

Gradually our big horticultural organisations began to see that Winter Gardens could be a popular attraction.  In 1986 Wakehurst opened its winter garden initially focussing on specimen-based planting.  By the late 2010s it was looking a little dated and so the garden supervisor Francis Annette redesigned it in 2018 with around 33,000 plants but from only 46 different genera. 

Ten years later in 1996 the Sir Harold Hillier Garden at Romsey began laying out its Winter Garden, and this has recently been extended to 4 acres.  It  marked a different approach to how much of the original Hillier Arboretum was planted,  being now much more concerned with plant combinations and massed effects rather than individual specimens.  There was also a strong emphasis on making the most of winter scent, alongside unusual barks, stems and structure.

1996 also saw the opening of the Winter Garden at Anglesey Abbey just north of Cambridge. [See this earlier post for more on the history of the gardens there]   After that the Winter Garden suddenly becomes fashionable.  Marks Hall opened its Millennium Walk 2000 with winter specifically in mind.

RHS Garden Harlow Carr  © RHS from Financial Times 9th Nov 2018

There is no specific Winter Garden at Wisley, although they do have  a Winter Walk instead, but the RHS opened one at Harlow Carr in 2006 and another at Hyde Hall in Essex in 2018.

There is another at Rosemoor which has proved so popular it’s being doubled in size with a design by Jo Thompson.

The National Trust had also taken up the idea big time, again one suspects to increase visitor footfall especially  as more and more properties are open throughout the year.

Dunham Massey’s Winter Garden photo by Alistair Poole

Dunham Massey in Cheshire now has the largest Winter Garden in Europe, stretching to 7 acres. It was laid out in 2007, with advice from Roy Lancaster, on what had become an overgrown and neglected area of the estate, originally part of Dunham’s deer park. It took some  time to establish and opened for  the winter of 2009. The following year another opened at Mottisfont Abbey, perhaps as a counter-attraction to the famous rose garden.

Another great garden with a reputation traditionally for just one season/range of plants where a Winter Garden has been created is Bodnant.  Taking four years to plan, and another two to install it was built on the site of a neglected  Edwardian rockery and opened in 2012.   Other National Trust gardens where there are new Winter Gardens include Osterley in west London  and Kingston Lacy in Dorset.

Even when they haven’t laid out specially designed Winter Gardens the Trust is strongly  encouraging people to visit many of its other great gardens at this time of year to see them in a new light, particularly the structure and effects of snow and frost.  Their website  has a long list of gardens with areas of winter interest including  Biddulph, Stowe, Stourhead, Mount Stewart and Rowallane.

Kew began a new Winter Garden project in 2022 on the mounded site of William Chambers 1759 Temple of Victory, one of the few higher spots in the gardens. A second phase has just been completed and the third and final phase will open later this year.

Where the big organisations have led so smaller gardens open to the public are taking up the cause too. Sometimes it’s just opening for snowdrops such as at Hodsock Priory near Nottingham but in other places it’s involved designing a Winter Garden such as  the one at Littlethorpe Manor in Yorkshire which opened in 2008. More on snowdrop gardens in this earlier post

Newspapers too have taken up the cause of promoting the garden in winter and most gardening columns now carry the obligatory 10 or 20 great gardens to visit this winter.  As Matthew Wilson wrote in the Financial Times in 2018 “The notion that gardens somehow go to sleep at the end of October has always irked me. Gardens never sleep, nor do they cease to be interesting. If the additions of seasonal lighting displays and specialist winter gardens encourage more people to discover and embrace the underlying natural beauty of gardens in winter then so much the better.”