Winter is so grey.
Most of the trees have shed their leaves and are showing only the pewter and cinnamon shades of their bark. The grass is faded to a bleached olive drab — when it’s not covered by snow, that is. And the slush and the salt stains only highlight how wintry it is.
So you could argue that it’s even more important to have colorful trees and bushes in the winter than it is in the summer. The summer is vibrant all by itself. Winter needs all the help it can get.
You can install shrubs and trees with colorful stems, you can plant bushes that produce colorful fruit that lasts all winter, or you can plant winter-blooming varieties which will produce flowers in the darkest time of year.
Colorful Stems and Bark
For multi-season color, any number of maples are good. Japanese maples, for instance, are often very fiery in the winter, as well as the rest of the year. There is also the redbark cherry, which has, as the name suggests, very attractive red bark in paperbark birch patterns. As the tree matures, it looks a bit like it has tiger stripes.
If you’re not looking so much for bright colors but simply want to add some interest to the landscape, Japanese Stewartia (also known as Deciduous Camellia) is an ornamental tree that has a very distinctive bark that looks like a brown camouflage pattern.
Colorful Berries
In addition to the benefit of winter color, these fruiting bushes will bring all sorts of wildlife to your yard to enjoy its bounty. Evergreen Holly is a very common choice in Northern Virginia. But there are a number of holly varieties. Some, like Winterberry, lose their leaves and only stems full of popping red berries remain.
Winter-Blooming Bushes
When you start looking, it’s surprising how many plants actually do bloom in the winter. For starters, there’s the pussy-willow. Those little doe-foot tip are all flowers. Sure, they don’t catch the eye that well, but no one can argue they aren’t attractive. Spending as little as 5% of your home’s value on landscaping can provide an ROI of up to 150%. Nearly 90% of real estate agents recommend that homeowners invest in landscaping before putting their home on the market.
The Leatherleaf Mahonia, also known as grapeholly, is a fairly tall perennial (I would hesitate to call it a bush.) that produces yellow bell-like clusters of flowers in late winter. These flowers eventually convert to fruit, offering food for the birds early in the year. Other grapehollys come in different colors, but the leatherleaf is perhaps the hardiest.