Every climate has its problems. In northern areas, winter comes early and stays late, much to gardeners' chagrin. This may explain why gardeners in cold climates often create beautiful gardens. They may be the result of long winter nights spent planning and dreaming.
But don't wait until summer to enjoy your garden. There's entertainment out there even when it's shrouded with snow and whipped by frigid winds. Trees and shrubs offer dramatic silhouettes through every season, but the shapes of their limbs and the texture of their bark are most pronounced after leaves drop in fall.
Evergreens become even more endearing when they're the only verdure in sight. Combined with plants that hold their form through winter, weatherproof garden features, such as fences, walls, statuary and pillars offer reassuring evidence that both you and your garden are waiting patiently for spring. Meanwhile, a bird feeder well stocked with sunflower seeds or suet, and a variety of shrubs with berries and seed-laden, dormant perennials will assure plenty of appreciative winged visitors.
Stretching the Season
For any gardener frustrated by a short season, one of the simplest coping strategies is to stretch the season as far as possible. In autumn, cover late season performers with boxes, blankets, or non-woven season-extending fabric, or floating row cover, to help them survive the first few frosts. Lobelia, pansies, and other diehard annuals will continue to bloom until snow blankets the ground. In addition, many container-grown flowering plants can be cleaned up, pruned back, and brought indoors, where they will continue to color sunny window sills for several weeks. Given sufficient light, you can coax zonal geraniums to bloom indoors throughout winter months.
Outside, stock your landscape with ornamental grasses that form buff-colored silhouettes that remain attractive well into winter. To insure that spring comes as early as possible, make liberal use of the small spring-flowering bulbs that appear before the last snow has gone, such as crocus, snowdrops, and squill. When you go outdoors in late winter to admire buds forming on forsythias and flowering cherries, it doubles the excitement to find flowering bulbs pushing up around your feet.
Evergreens that withstand prolonged periods of extreme cold include junipers and spruces in assorted shapes and sizes. These are invaluable for keeping the garden furnished through winter months. For a unified look, work with two or three species that offer slight variations in form and texture. If your landscape includes other hardy evergreens, pair them with contrasting shrubby junipers, which come in varying shades of green.
Seasonal Shelter
Snow is a cold-climate garden's best insulation. But you never know when snow will come, how much insulating cover it will give, or how long it will stay. To keep your dormant plants safe from winter harm if the snows don't come, and to increase its insulating effects, cover dormant plants with loose evergreen boughs after cleaning up the garden in late fall. When you remove the boughs in spring, don't be surprised to see tender green shoots breaking through the soil slightly ahead of schedule.
Stone walls, thickets of shrubs, and other short barriers also provide the garden with extra protection from wind while providing visual interest when the rest of the landscape is buried in snow.
Chilly Containers
Cold-climate gardeners often become experts at growing plants in containers. These range from window boxes that hold huge cascades of petunias and other trailing plants to barrel halves brimming with nasturtiums and various other tender or hardy plants. While the summer show of container-grown annuals is always outstanding in the neighborhoods of the north, comparable wonders take place indoors over the winter months, as smaller containers are called into service to hold bulbs forced into bloom on sunny window sills.
Tulip, hyacinth and daffodil bulbs sold in the fall are easy to grow in containers, and bulbs potted up in the fall will bloom in late winter or early spring, provided they are given a suitable regimen of temperature, water and light. Hyacinths are especially endearing bulbs to force because of their intoxicating fragrance. Additionally, hyacinths have sturdy stems and are less prone to falling over than the long-stemmed tulips and daffodils usually grown in pots.
You can use any type of container for forcing bulbs, although tulips and large-flowered daffodils grow best when planted in deep pots, with at least 3 in (7 cm) of soil below the bulbs, and 4 in (10 cm) of soil over the bulbs. However, it is possible to coax small daffodils and hyacinths into bloom by planting them in shallow dishes with a mixture of soil and pebbles tucked up to the necks of the bulbs, taking care not to cover the growing points of the bulbs.
These bulbs are so forgiving that many gardeners use any containers they have on hand for forcing bulbs. Later, when the plants are ready to be displayed in high-visibility spots indoors, the recycled planting pots can be temporarily slipped into more decorative brass or ceramic containers for display indoors while they are flowering.
For the first six weeks after planting any hardy spring-flowering bulbs in containers, keep the soil barely moist, and store the planted containers in a cool place, such as a garage or unhealed porch that stays above freezing, or put the pots into a plastic bag, seal the bag and store it in the refrigerator. Although you may see no signs of life from the bulbs, the roots are actively growing. After 6 weeks, when shoots of green do appear, move the pots to a bright location, but keep them cool. Continue to water the soil regularly, and enjoy the show as the leaves give way to dramatic flower spikes. After the flowers fade, discard the bulbs, because they will not bloom perfectly again. Bulbs forced to grow in containers simply do not get the strong sunlight they need to store enough food to produce flowers the following growing season.
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