Got winter garden color, beyond foliage and December-blooming flowers?
Not that we Southerners can’t easily have something blooming every week of the year, including early- and mid-winter with camellias, early paperwhite daffodils, and mahonia; then there are bright variegated plants like Gold Spot aucuba, Color Guard yucca and crimson red barberry, and berries galore.
But what about non-plant color? Not talking about garden art, whether your taste is for large sculptures, flags, or folksy little pointy-hat gnomes tucked there and there; my fav is Granny’s concrete chicken, proudly ensconced a plinth that once supported a now-broken birdbath. And of course, my sometimes-maligned glass bottle trees, though they certainly do release the endorphins especially when backlight late in the afternoon.
But one of the easiest ways to brighten a dull wintry scene is with colorful pots, either as standalone accents or grouped for a more dramatic effect. Filled with seasonal flowers and foliage plants, they make a very bold statement, a trick I employ with my deck collection of cold-hardy cacti and succulents, which need extra drainage in our winter rains; the green and blue pottery visually unifies the motley assortment of bizarre shapes.
But my sweetheart just took our little galimaufry cottage garden to a new level by custom-painting over half a dozen of my large, formerly creamy-white Grubb pots, which I had scattered throughout the garden thinking it added just the right amount of repetition (important in a cluttered cottage garden). Susan Easter-egged them up with a faux-distressed patchwork of pastels, which has a sweeter effect than I would have done myself, especially when coupled with pansies, violas, snapdragons, and dusty miller. I have buried a couple dozen daffodils for a later surprise.
But what about staining or painting fences, decks, and painting garden furniture? My creative landscape architect friend Rick Griffin encourages backyard gardeners to have fun, be bold, almost circus-like, and let colors reign supreme. He once admitted that, after designing an imposing wood fence and heavy gate in his back garden. But he couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that it was somehow lacking. “I made it clunky and functional, which I like, but for some reason it was just awful… imposing and drab,” as he put it; “But one night it struck me - it needed bold colors. And I couldn’t help myself, but my wife found me out in the garden on a Sunday morning before church, painting designs on the posts.”
Taking his cue, I started dabbling with garden paints, first by staining my decks a teal blue, which blends with the hodge-podge plants without being a poke in the eye. Then I tone down the starkly off-white concrete walks with watered-down latex paint to make them glow faintly; then fence posts, bird houses, my galvanized steel above-ground water feature and raised beds...
I finally backed off on the Krylon and Rustoleum spray paints, and this year decided to continue this year’s boycott of the trendy Pantone Color of the Year, which for years I have used to paint a small deck where I would plant various flowers to hone my sense of color complements.
I just couldn’t go with 2025’s Mocha Mousse, a hue of brown that I already have lots of with bark mulch, and now this coming year’s Cloud Dancer, which the color experts say is “a symbol of calming influence in a frenetic society” as well as “a blank canvas” on which we can all start again.
Sorry, Pantone, it’s just another white. And I have a partner who brightens our garden while toning me down with Easter egg pastels.
