Bringing your garden inside for winter
Just because it’s cold doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the great outdoors from the comfort of your living room.
Okay, so if you have kids at the muddy stage, then ‘bringing the garden inside’ is what they do on a daily basis, via their boots (or in some hardcore cases, their socks). But most sensible people would prefer to enjoy a bit of horticultural relaxation without necessarily leaving the sofa. This is where winter comes in.
Proper, old-school gardeners like to sigh contentedly about the joys of browsing seed catalogues with a nice cup of tea and a biscuit at this time of year, quite possibly while sitting in a shed. But planning and scheming for next spring only gets you so far.
Arguably, the best way to enjoy a garden in winter is through a well-insulated pane of glass, and if you did your autumn tidying you should have an atmospheric, if stark, view of rain-blackened stems and skeletal tree-forms which can be highlighted in interesting ways with some well-placed outdoor lighting. But there are other plants which will want to snuggle up with you indoors, and these can really brighten up your home.
Good plants in winter
• Pelargoniums. Pelargoniums in pots are something no lazy gardener should be without: they’re practically impossible to kill, they pump out flowers in bright zingy colours for months and months, and you can impress your friends (or, failing that, yourself) by making loads of new baby plants each year just by cutting off a few nice young shoots at the end of the summer and sticking them in little pots of their own. Best of all, they follow you into the house, when the frosts come, and look all cheerful and green on a windowsill for a while before – bam! – bursting into hot, fiery colour again around March, when outside it’s all still bare branches and shivering bulbs.
• Herbs. Your potted herbs will thank you for the window-sill treatment, too – rosemary, oregano, lemon grass and parsley work well, and you can dig up your chives too and pot them up for winter use. Remember to check the plants for bugs before they come in, and it’s a good idea to tidy them up if they need a bit of pruning, and topdress the pots with new compost. Don’t worry if the new environment makes them look a bit miserable for a while. Make sure they’re not overheating, and keep the soil moist but not soaking wet.
• Beautiful barks. Of course, you don’t have to be greenfingered to bring nature into your house: collect interesting branches – either bare, evergreen or with berries - to display in large vases, and look out for the seedheads of plants like echinaceas, rudbeckias and agapanthus, which have lovely sculptural forms in winter. Don’t strip the whole garden though: these berries and seeds are a vital resource for birds and other wildlife, so leave enough for them to find, and they’ll brighten up the view from your window in return.