Let’s face it, January is not the most uplifting of months. Even here on the green green west coast, things are a little dull at this time of year.
And so, I believe that in January we have to look to the small things in life for cheer. There are no swaths of blooming lavender or happy sunflowers, no butterflies flitting around a great pink patch of Echinacea, no bright orange pumpkins ripening in the back garden...
But if we look closely, at the tiny, delicate detail in our gardens, there are still pockets of cheer, made more significant for their scarcity, like the last ripe tomato in the garden at the end of the season.
In my own garden today I found the little pink bell flowers on my Evergreen Huckleberry (Vaccinum ovatum), dangling quietly off of a branch.
Another bunch of white bell flowers are in full bloom on the Strawberry Tree (Arbutus unedo), which by the way is an excellent large evergreen shrub for not just winter interest but year-round colour and show. This great shrub even has large red berries that really do resemble strawberries in the fall, often ripe at the same time as the flowers are blooming. Not many shrubs can do that.
There is of course also the entire palette of winter heather (Erica carnea) that is blooming now in pinks and whites, not to mention the heaths (Calluna vulgaris) that have interesting foliage in burnt oranges in the winter.
The Christmas rose (Helleborus sp.) is a fabulous winter flower, just now beginning to bloom. There are so many gorgeous cultivars of this plant in whites, purples, pinks and even chartreuse.
My favourite shrub at this time of year is the Witchazel (Hamamellis x intermedia). Every January, this deciduous shrubs produces hundreds of little pom-poms that hang off of its bare branches. Mine is the yellow cultivar 'Pallida,' but there is also 'Jelena' (orange) and 'Diane' (red), 'Arnold Promise' (yellow), 'Ruby Glow' (coppery-red) and 'Westerstede'(yellow, later flowering). In the summer, the shrub has medium green leaves, and excellent bright colour in the fall. It grows to about 8' tall and 8' wide in ten years.
Looking for colour in the garden in January can be like looking for lost socks in the clean laundry, but it doesn't have to be that way. We can plan our gardens as much for summer as for winter so that we always have something to brighten the cold, dark days.