Winter colour courts controversy

I was so sure ornamental grasses and classy seedheads were the ‘it’ girls of winter these days, that I fully splashed out on them – stipas, calamagrostis, pennisetum …you name it, I’ve got it. Good heavens, I’m only one unwise purchase away from pampas grass.

You can, then, imagine my dismay this week when Elaine and Laura instead, got wildly excited about their willows (Salix) and dogwoods (Cornus) again.

I’m not a huge fan. I don’t understand why they get so enthused by these featureless spikes just because they’re green or red. Graffiti is colourful but not widely popular. 

I can only imagine gardening contractors sold the idea of dogwoods to cash-strapped councils as a way to keep roundabouts looking cheery for the dark months of the year (nine here in Scotland) and the fad has spread.

If it’s colour you want there are some properly pretty winter shrubs such as wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox ‘Luteus’); witchhazel (Hamamelis) or Viburnum bodnantense – but they’re probably too mainstream to win favour with the girls who can be slightly ‘up themselves’ horticulturally.  

They’ll come back down to earth – just as people fled back to the vastly superior taste of irn bru after an embarrassing mid-life ‘fad’ for kale juice (OK, that was me).

But who knows, by the end of this post, they might have me begging for some cornus cuttings!

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What Caroline has failed to appreciate here is that creating a satisfying winter garden is a complex exercise requiring a balance of flower power, scent, colour and structure.

Intelligently pruned and positioned (which is maybe where Caroline is going wrong…) willows and dogwoods reliably provide uplifting swathes of colour to set off other winter flowering bulbs and shrubs. Just look at what they manage to achieve at RHS Wisley, in our feature picture this week.

Willows (Salix) are much more robust than dogwoods and if you go for this genus to provide your winter colour then you really must commit to an annual pruning regime. Left to their own devices they can soon become socking great trees whose thirsty lifestyle can see their roots infiltrate water courses and drains. You can either stool them to the ground each spring, or pollard them back to a main stem. I know Elaine is fairly gung ho and shears them all off with a chainsaw each spring.

Dogwoods (Cornus) need a bit more consideration. Some are robust enough to have the same treatment as willows and will grow back each year with vigorous strong wands. Others, and in particular the rightly popular Cornus ‘Midwinter Fire’, whose narrower stems form more of a birds nest effect definitely conjuring up the tongues of flame its name suggests, need gentler treatment. An annual prune weakens these shrubs too much so it’s best to cut back or coppice only every second or third spring, or in rotation around a clump.

But positioning is paramount; they must be able to catch the low winter sunlight, and if you are also able to provide an evergreen or buff backdrop then you can create horticultural nirvana –

Mainly for Caroline’s benefit, I’ve made a short video on these recommendations and the link is at the end.

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Frankly, what IS the point of fannying around with a snip here and a snip there for something as rugged as a willow? Rev up the motor, get the job done and move on, sisters.  

And if it wasn’t for all those handy municipal bushes, where on earth can we all shove all our old irn bru cans? – waste-paper bins appear to be so last-century on the roundabouts and roadsides round here. 

There is a bit of something in what Caroline says, though – these cornuses and willows are ….well…pretty dull in the spring, and the summer, and the autumn, so I reckon you need a decent-sized garden before you can justify these babies for the sake of a few pretty-coloured stems in the January sunshine.

There are other bad boys that can look quite amazing in a great big knock-out winter garden like Saville’s or Hillier’s: the white-washed bramble, for instance – Rubus cockburnianus – which resembles a startling heap of ghostly spaghetti in winter, but it will spread and spread and spread….it’s a bramble, for heaven’s sake! What did you expect?!

And there’s another rather rampant winter beauty, Japanese wineberry (Rubus phoenicolasius) which has enchanting, thick arching stems covered in red ‘fur’ – extraordinary where I grow it, backlit by a low sun as Laura suggests.  

But this is no one-hit wonder like Laura’s pampered pruned perfections; it has a second moment of real stardom at the end of July when it starts producing handfuls of sticky, sweet, little red berries, a few every day. And they are just perfect to float in a sexy cocktail at the end of a long day’s chainsawing, I find.

Which camp are you in – are coloured winter stems dire or delightful? Let us know in the comments below.

Watch Laura explain to Caroline how she should be maintaining her willows and dogwoods in this short video

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This deciduous and woody shrub is very accommodating and adaptable, it’s also extremely hardy and is tolerant of almost any aspect or soil. No wonder it’s Louise Sims’ Great Plant this Month! Click on the box below to find out what it is.

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