In fall the Instagram feeds of many of our favorite gardeners, quite understandably, start to wither or move indoors. Not so that of Dutch garden designer Frank Heijligers. Indeed, much like the dames of imperial Russia, who, rather that retreating from the cold, donned furs and tiaras in anticipation of the social high season, Frank’s winter garden seemed to reach the height of its sparkling charm.
Enchanted, we decided to ask Frank, who grows grasses, perennials, trees, and shrubs at his nursery, Plantwerk, to divulge his secrets for a successful winter garden. Here are his nine tips for adding sparkle and moody color:
Above: Now a dramatic black, the once purple cones of Agastache ‘Black Adder’ still stand tall in the frosty winter garden.
“Successful winter gardens need a lot of plants with good structure in them,” says Frank. “The plants have to be strong and have more than one interest: nice foliage, bloom, color, seed head, change of color in fall, strong skeleton in winter.”
Showcase long-lasting seedheads.
Above: Like spectators at the ballet, crowds of Monarda ‘Croftway Pink’ seedheads watch a changing fall landscape.
Fill the gaps.
Above: Because plants with good structure tend to bloom later, Frank notes that the successful four-season garden “starts with having a little more patience in spring.” To fill in the gap, he uses bulbs. Alliums, which maintain a sculptural seed head after they have gone by, are a good choice. Above: One of Frank’s gardens in summer. Though lust and leafy, it still maintains a textured feel.
Consider frost-proof plants.
Above: A similar border garden in winter, when the regal heads of Phlomis take on a silver sheen.
“Hosta or Alchemilla mollis are plants that look good early on in the year, but with the first bit of frost, they collapse,” Frank says. “You need plants like Phlomis, Aster, Eupatorium, Veronicastrum, and Anemone combined with grasses like Deschampsia, Miscanthus, Sporobolus, and Festuca mairei to make the garden look good until March.”
Above: Another sculptural favorite: Veronicastrum ‘Pink Spike.’
Bonus: Birds love all the leftover seedheads in Frank’s hibernal garden.
When Sarah Pajwani and her family moved into their house near Maidenhead (an hour from London) in 2011, it was surrounded by an “overgrown field.” Having created a design rationale with the help of professional landscapers, Sarah set about filling her garden with plants of her choice, border by border. Despite her best efforts, in winter she would gaze out of the windows and still feel that there was nothing to look at.
Now, every garden-facing room in the house frames a different aspect of the winter scene, and the house has a lot of windows. Dare we suggest that winter is the garden’s best season? We can report that Saint Timothee, as it is called, was the first garden of the year to be open for the National Garden Scheme and Sarah gave us a tour.
Read on for 11 clever design ideas from Sarah to make the garden glow in the winter:
Above: A row of glowing red Cornus sanginea ‘Midwinter Fire’ brings out the best in Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii. Famously vivid in spring, the euphorbia holds on to its structure and excellent leaf color in winter.
Saint Timothee is a picture of 1930s gentility, with an Enid Blyton kind of name. Yet the garden is not in a time warp. Sarah uses colorful stems, scented shrubs (such as Lonicera fragrantissima,Viburnum x bodnantese ‘Dawn’, Sarcococca confusa), sparsely flowering trees (Prunus x subhirtella ‘Autumnalis’) as well as grasses mixed with evergreens to brighten the winter scene. Several paths and borders lead the eye from one of the inside windows, across the garden.
2. Mixed Grasses
Above: Smoldering dogwood stems draw attention to the drama of super-sized pampas grass, flanking a pond.
As gardens fade and the days darken, it’s tempting to forget about what’s going on outdoors until early spring when everything jolts back into life. But this is a missed opportunity. Careful plant choices can reap major benefits in the winter.
It’s well known that certain trees and shrubs can play a leading role in the coldest season, but the right perennials and grasses also can look mesmerizing. By focusing on a plant’s structure and its ability to retain its shape, you can create schemes that look incredible in the fourth season. Read on to discover which plants will maximize this effect and learn to embrace the beauty of winter decay:
Spiky plants and thistles including teasel, echinops, and eryngiums tend to hold their structure brilliantly in the winter.
Echinops
Above: Globe echinops. Photograph by Tobias Myrstrand Leander via Flickr.
In winter, the stiff purple-blue heads of echinops turn brown and maintain their posture.
Grasses
Above: Grasses and perennials in December at Torrey Pines Nature Reserve in La Jolla, California. Photograph by Anne Reeves via Flickr.
Play off these strong forms with billowing clumps of airy grasses such as Deschampsia cespitosa or Molinia caerulea which will fade to blond and buff colors over late autumn and early winter.
A steeply pitched lot can present a challenge for even the most seasoned garden designer. Many resort to terracing the slope to create flat ground to work within, but moving that much earth is expensive–and it deeply disturbs the site. We spoke to three garden designers who created diverse gardens on very sloped sites to learn how they handled this particular challenge. Below, these experts share their best tips, from figuring out what plants will thrive to how to keep the soil in place during establishment.
Use a “cover crop” to prevent erosion.
Above: Because of heavy invasive weed pressure, Refugia planted only grass species in the first phase of this project. This included seeding a mix of fine fescue and annual rye, before planting warm-season ornamental grasses like big bluestem, switchgrass, and little bluestem. Once weeds were under control, they added flowering perennials. Photograph by Kayla Fell, courtesy of Refugia Design.
When reimagining a residential sloped yard in Pennsylvania, Refugia Design Build first removed overgrown shrubs and a ton of invasive English ivy, leaving a lot of exposed earth. Knowing that preventing erosion would be key in the first year, they strategically seeded a mix of fine fescue and annual rye. “The annual rye served as a fast-germinating winter cover crop—a temporary tool that allowed us to get almost instant erosion control while waiting for the fescue to germinate and the rest of the plantings to be completed,” says landscape designer Amanda Branum, who was the design lead for this project. Branum notes they cut back the rye before it went to seed the following spring.
Pay attention to root structure.
California-based landscape designer Fi Campbell says she focussed on plants with “distinguished roots,” to hold the soil on the slope of a residential property in Los Angeles. In her climate, that meant native bunch grasses and Muhlenbergia (muhly grass), which have deep root systems. Campbell also used ground covers like creeping sages and coyote bush for stabilization. Shrubs, including toyon, manzanita, and various different buckwheat, help anchor the garden. Tip: Prairie Moon Nursery includes images of root structures for all the seeds and plants it sells, if you need help visualizing roots.
It’s not every day that a client asks their landscape designer to come look at a barge they’re thinking of buying, but that was exactly the call the team at Hollander Design Landscape Architects received a few years back. The property in question was a house that had been built on a torpedo barge in the 1950s and docked on a harbor in the Hamptons ever since. The bulkhead was in need of a total rebuild—and the landscape would need restoration afterwards. Hollander Design was up for the challenge.
The clients ended up buying the house, and after a marine construction contractor rebuilt the bulkhead, walks, and the docks, Hollander Design returned to conduct major revegetation efforts. The clients were looking for a low-maintenance landscape, as they wanted the home to be a retreat from their busy, working lives. They desired a beautiful landscape, but they didn’t want a garden that would compete with the breathtaking setting. The trick would be to create the illusion that the barge and bulkhead were knitted into the marsh around them.
“Everything that’s around the house is very wet and boggy, but their property happens to be a high, dry spot because it’s up on that bulkhead,” explains landscape designer Melissa Reavis, the director of Hollander Design’s residential studio. “So we chose plants that were appropriate to that area but completely different from the immediate area that it sits in.” Think beach grass instead of the nearby rushes, plus, beach plums and northern bayberry that are found in nearby dunes.
In addition to its unique barge setting, the property experiences intense deer pressure (a challenge that many gardeners can relate to). Furthermore, the site is exposed to sea salt and increasingly frequent storm surges. “We were left with a pretty limited palette,” says Reavis, but she focussed on what she calls “bulletproof plants for a coastal environment” to create a garden that is almost as magical as its setting. Here, her formula for getting it right.
Photography by Neil Landino, courtesy of Hollander Design Landscape Architects.
The soil comes first.
Above: From overheard, you can see how the barge is tucked in behind the rebuilt bulkhead.
After the bulkhead rebuild, Hollander Design needed to replace a lot of the soil, which Reavis explains had been backfilled with whatever was on hand back in the 1950s. The new soil is mostly clean-draining sand, so that nutrients won’t leach into the water. “Everything that was replanted in that area is planted almost into direct sand and we don’t add any additional nutrient loads to the soil, to ensure that we weren’t affecting water quality around it,” Reavis explains.
Design for minimal maintenance.
Above: Instead of a lawn, the main open area of the property is one over-sized perennial bed. The gravel path is used to bring kayaks and paddleboards down to the dock.
To fulfill the owners desire for a low-maintenance landscape, Reavis eschewed turf lawn and instead planted native and climate-adapted perennials. Hollander Design’s maintenance team does a hard cutback in May to keep the plants from outgrowing their homes, which also ensures a long bloom, but otherwise the maintenance is minimal—and free of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers.
Mimic the nearby aesthetic.
Above: The American beachgrass planted on the bulkhead mimics the look of the native rushes in the surrounding wetlands, so your eye sees an almost uninterrupted swath of textured green.
“You feel completely enveloped by the harbor here,” says Reavis. “The landscape’s job here is just to make it feel as knitted into this magical world as possible.” To complement the landscape, Reavis pulled in not only native plants, but also climate-adapted ones that feel like they’re in the same world as the natural landscape beyond. “They’re all flowing grasses and flowing perennials, and so nothing feels out of place with the more native natural habitat,” says Reavis.
Mints for the win.
Above: Russian sage ‘Denim n Lace’ is reliably deer- and rabbit-resistant.
We’ve long admired the work of New York architects Messana O’Rorke, so when we inquired about the glass-wall extension and surrounding landscaping of an impressive project in London’s Tufnell Park, we were led to the work of landscape designer Joanne Bernstein. The project is Bernstein’s own property and when she took it on, the garden was an abandoned mess. The 120-foot south-east-facing garden is shaded by the large London Plane trees in the grounds of flats behind as well as a group of established trees within the garden. The challenge was to create a natural progression from the sunlit section to the shaded section towards the rear of the property. Bernstein designed three garden “rooms”, each with a slightly different atmosphere and texture but unified by hardscaping material and a single sensibility towards planting.
With a previous career as an art historian and curator, Bernstein holds an interest in modernism and strong geometry which continue to translate into her garden layouts along with a reduced palette of hardscaping materials. This is all balanced with “exuberant textured planting of both perennials and shrubs with a naturalistic, slightly wild, feel to soften the hard lines of the layout,” she describes. Join us for a walk through Bernstein’s garden.
Above: The garden walls are the original Victorian walls dating back to 1870s when the house was built. Says Bernstein: “The first three to four meters of the walls nearest the house are taller than in the rest of the garden to provide more privacy. The trellising adds more privacy and the climbing plants now cover the walls and trellising both.” The pavers throughout the garden are Sawn York stone from Stone Heritage in Derbyshire. Photograph by Sarah Cuttle for Joanne Bernstein. Above: Messana O’Rorke played a key role designing an extension to support the transformed landscape. They extended a wall with a transparent cube made a glass steel frame and flat roof. The dining area is set on a two-level platform that steps down to a small terrace with pavers leading to a second terrace, defined with transitional planting and then into the back-most, shaded section of the garden. Above: The flat roof of the extension functions as a living roof. Above: Here, two perpendicular glass panels create a seamless corner that slide open creating, as Bernstein explains “a direct and continuous relationship with the garden experienced inside the extension.” Above: The grasses are Miscanthus sinensis “Hermann Müssel”. Yarrow planted here was Achillea “Mondpagode” but only lived a couple years due to the heavy clay soil. It’s since been replaced with Sanguisorba officinalis “Red Thunder.”
All week, we’re republishing some of our favorite Garden Visits that have a personal connection to our writers. No public gardens here, no vast estates, no professionally designed landscapes—just the backyards, vegetable patches, and flower beds that remind our writers of home. This story by Gardenista contributor Clare Coulson is from June 2022.
In the summer of 2017, I planted a gravel garden along a scrappy stretch of land that edged a recently renovated studio. I wanted to create a small garden that was a space for guests to look out to or sit in. I knew that this was a sunbaked area—it faces south and has no protection from either the summer sun or the wind that whips through the fields it faces out onto. And with extremely free-draining sandy soil, whatever was planted here had to be resilient and, as I had no plans to irrigate, drought-tolerant, too.
Photography by Clare Coulson.
Above: Stipa tenuissima is the star plant in the garden, acting as a tactile and shimmering base for the spires of verbascum and verbena to move through.
I signed up for the excellent gravel garden study day at Beth Chatto’s garden in Essex, which was a step-by-step with David Ward (he worked with Beth when she created her famed gravel garden in the 1980s). His key tips were: 1) choose plants carefully (Beth’s mantra, after all, was ‘right plant, right place’); and 2) start those plants off well. That means digging in some compost at the outset to ensure that you’ve got good soil and then soaking plants really well before you plant them, ideally leaving each plant soaking in a bucket of water for an hour before planting. Water everything well, but beyond this do not get out the hose.
Above: Dianthus carthusianorum is the perfect dry garden plant; from a low mound of fine leaves, it sends up leggy stems topped with hot pink flowers. They will occasionally re-flower if deadheaded.
We used a sub-base to stabilize the areas where we would walk around the beds and this was topped with gravel. I was left with two organic shaped large beds and once everything was planted I added some gravel around the plants, too, which helps minimize weeds but also retains some moisture.
To save money I grew almost every plant from seed. Some of those plants were incredibly easy to grow: Stipa tenuissima, Dianthus carthusianorum and Verbascum chaixii ‘Album’. Others, including Verbena bonariensis and Eryngium giganteum, I found much more tricky from seed, but they were brilliant self seeders; from a couple of verbena plants, there is now a self-seeded verbena forest in high summer of hundreds of plants that have just placed themselves in any available crack.
Above: Considering a garden from inside a house or building is crucial, creating vistas and sightlines from the place where you might sit and look out.
And the garden has really evolved to be a garden of self-seeders. Poppies have introduced themselves, flowering earlier than everything else in the summer and providing some color. These are followed by hundreds of white verbasums in June and July before the verbena peaks in late summer. I’ve also added some bulbs too—Narcissus ‘Thalia’ for spring and then Allium spaerocephalon for a later color pop around late June.
Light and movement are key to the garden’s success and I can’t say I thought that much about either when I was starting out as a gardener. The sun rises directly behind the garden providing some jaw-dropping moments in the morning. When the grasses here, which include Stipa gigantea and Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foester’ and especially the Stipa tenuissima, move gently on the breeze, it becomes a mesmerizing highly, tactile space. But this is also a garden for insects, and through the summer the garden hums all day and evening with a succession of bees, hoverflies, and butterflies.
Self seeders can, of course, be a pain to garden with. Each summer something edges more into focus and threatens to take over. There’s a constant battle with bronze fennel; its hazy clouds of foliage provide beautiful texture in spring and I love the towering umbels and incredible aromatic element they provide, but leave them to seed at your peril.
Recently we spotted a project on The Modern House that compelled us to stop our scroll and investigate deeper: a home that looks otherworldly and not of this time, located in Dartmoor, a region of southwest England known for its rugged landscape dotted with outcroppings and pre-historic sites. Capped with a rolling green roof and set into a hillside, the two-story residence disappears into its environment, sometimes literally.
“We wanted something that was timeless, that would still be here in a couple of hundred years. I read so many articles about houses with conservatories, swimming pools, tennis courts, games rooms and cinemas. You just don’t need all that,” its owner Gail Pirkis, a literary editor, told The Modern House. Instead, she and her husband, David, hired Peter Hall from Van der Steen and Hall Architects to design a unique but unostentatious house that “faded away around” the landscape.
The project took seven years to complete, during which time they found themselves subtracting the superfluous from their plans (“we didn’t want fancy bathrooms; we didn’t want gizmos in the kitchen”). What they ended up with is a truly low-impact home with a soft, modest footprint that’s simpatico with the natural world that surrounds it.
Here’s a peek. For the full story (and interior images), go here.
Above: The couple prioritized the use of local materials. “The granite that faces the building comes from the spoil heap of the quarry that was used to build nearby Castle Drogo, the last castle to be built in Britain designed by Edwin Lutyens.”
Above: Two levels of green roofs help keep the house cool in the summer months.
Where would you expect to find a meadow filled with native flowers and grasses, where once an expanse of lawn grew? In a suburban front yard, as the short-back-and-sides neighbors give the gardener’s tousled vision the stink eye? At the summer home of weekend warriors who have newfound respect for the perils of mugwort? Or in an urban cemetery that doubles as a laboratory for biodiversity? Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, is home to an experimental wildflower meadow, seeded in October of 2022, and part of the cemetery’s Urban Grasslands initiative.
This summer, from June through July, I visited the meadow over the course of six weeks, watched its palette evolve, learned about the reasons for the transition from lawn to wildflowers, and some of the challenges unique to this unusual site.
Above: Coreopsis and Penstemon in the experimental meadow in early June.
Set on a ridge in South Brooklyn, with views of New York Harbor, Green-Wood is no ordinary cemetery. The green space is a haven not only for the dead but for the living: for birds and the birders who watch them, for a monk parakeet colony, for honey bees in hives, for native pollinators, for artists in residence, for researchers, and for the local community, who find respite from urban life among the towering trees of this nationally accredited arboretum and historic landmark.
Above: In early June the meadow’s palette is yellow with white relief from Penstemon and Achillea.
Stippled with weathered marble and brownstone headstones, the 1.2-acre wildflower meadow is one of four re-wilded areas in close to 30 acres of public lots on the cemetery’s historic perimeters. “These lots were some of the first areas to be developed as an affordable internment option when Green-Wood was established in 1838,” said Sara Evans, the Director Of Living Collections and Curator at Green-Wood. In contrast to the large opulent family lots, she explained, “the public lots are dense with small graves characteristically marked with modest headstones primarily made of more delicate stone.”
Collectively, they are now the site of the ongoing project to transition from high-maintenance turf that requires noisy and carbon-unfriendly mowing (which also risks damaging these modest headstones), “to resilient native species more tolerant of drought, an increasing feature as the planet warms and the climate changes.”
Each of the six sections in the experimental meadow is seeded with a different combination of native grass and wildflower species “that also differ in species-richness (low-to-medium-to-high diversity),” said Sara. The goal is to “test and see what communities evolve, especially in terms of mowing stresses.” Paths are mown to allow access for visitors and researchers, and each wildflower block is given at least one annual mow with a weedwacker or hedge trimmer, “cut very high, at eight to ten inches, to leave material for nesting pollinator habitat and seed heads to establish a seedbank,” she said.
Above: Coreopsis leaning over a mown path in the meadow.
To prepare the site prior to sowing, the existing lawn grasses were treated with herbicide. Sara explained that such a large area, “with hundreds headstones,” cannot be solarized. (This technique involves placing expanses of plastic sheeting over unwanted vegetation to heat the soil underneath, spurring the germination of seeds, and their subsequent death. With established plants it can take a very long time.) Despite the treatment, some resilient invasive and naturalized plants persist: Mugwort, as well as bermuda, foxtail, sweet vernal, and brome grasses remain a perennial challenge.r
The Silver Sands Motel in Greenport, NY, opened in 1957 as a laidback motel that felt more like a beach home away from home than a fussy hotel. When the property changed hands a few years back, the new owners were keen to keep the family-oriented spirit of this beloved destination alive. “They wanted to honor what Silver Sands had been and try to retain that sense of nostalgia, while still creating a modern, comfortable destination for new travelers,” says Melissa Reavis, a landscape designer at Hollander Design, the landscape design firm tasked with updating the surrounding property.
Sitting at the end of a wooded road, Silver Sands is sited on the Peconic Bay along 1,400 feet of sandy beach. Having worked on many residential properties throughout the East End and the North Fork, Reavis and her team were well aware of the challenges of the coastal wetland location. “Out in Long Island there’s extreme deer pressure,” she says. “And this site had dense clay soil, a high water table, and salt winds.”
The Hollander Design team developed a new master plan that kept much of the original landscape’s spirit, but wove in more garden beds, planted predominantly with a native plant palette that supports local birds and pollinators. “We tried to help highlight that unique ecosystem that surrounds Silver Sands,” says Reavis. “And because we were so careful about what we brought in and that were reflective of the natural environment, the property is still fully maintained without the use of any chemicals, and minimal irrigation and intervention.”
Here are 10 lessons everyday gardeners can take away from this inspiring project:
Photography by John Musnicki, courtesy of Hollander Design.
1. Start with a site inventory.
Above: In the research and planning stage, Reavis made sure to check out what plants were thriving on the property—and just beyond.
“We started out just by taking stock of what was there and what actually was surviving,” says Reavis. “In such a tough environment, you have to really go in with no ego and say, ‘What is already doing well?’ because that’s going to help ensure that whatever we plant can also survive.” Gardeners could do the same on their own property (and even on nearby yards and parks).
2. Assess the water table.
Above: A melange of grasses.
While gardeners often get their soil tested to learn its composition, Reavis says they’re often unaware of where they sit on the groundwater table. “As long as you know water isn’t within the first 24 inches of soil, then you have a dry site,” says Reavis. “At Silver Sands if we dug even 12 inches down, the holes would start to fill with water.” To determine where your land sits in relation to the water table, simply dig a hole. Because of the high water table, Reavis was inspired to plant rushes, which are accustomed to wet roots, in the perennial beds. “They’re a really beautiful native type of grass that I had never planted in a garden environment before, so it’s actually helped expand my own palette,” she adds.
3. Save the trees.
Above: None of the mature oak and pine trees were cut down.
With the exception of some dwarf spruces in the courtyard, Hollander Design left all the mature trees on the site. “I didn’t have to cut down a tree, which is almost unheard of for new construction,” says Reavis. “You walk onto that space and it feels like it’s been there forever because the trees are still there.” If you’re building new or renovating, work with your landscaper to preserve as many trees as you can.
4. Strengthen an indoor-outdoor connection.
Above: Planters right outside some guest room doors.
The hotel owners knew that the flow from the interior to exterior was key, so they shared the interior design plans with Hollander Design from the very start. “The room’s colors dictated some of the garden palette, especially within the private gardens,” says Reavis. “For instance, we would take some of the peaches that we were finding in the interiors and we would select an ‘Autumn Joy’ sedum because we knew it would come up in that same peach.”
To a certain sector of the design world, Sea Ranch is a legend—but many people have never heard of it. A planned community two hours north of San Francisco, Sea Ranch is a prime example of 1960s West Coast modernism. Its minimalist cedar-clad buildings sit on a seemingly untouched stretch of the Sonoma Coast, thanks to the original master plan by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin.
Halprin and the developers imagined Sea Ranch “living lightly on the land” and wrote strict rules about the landscaping to enforce this vision. Over time, though, the property surrounding the shared public buildings, including the Sea Ranch Lodge, lost its definition and become a hodgepodge of plants with confusing pathways.
When the Sea Ranch changed hands in 2018, the new owners hired Seattle architecture firm Mithun and interior designer Charles de Lisle to update the communal buildings, and California landscape architecture firm Terremototo redesign the landscape surrounding them. While the building refresh received accolades in the design media, the landscape went mostly unmentioned. “People said, ‘It looks like it’s always been there,’” says David Godshall, a partner at Terremoto, “I say that’s hard!” In fact, the Terremoto team went to extraordinary lengths to make the new plantings meld seamlessly into the surrounding land. “The wildness is what makes Sea Ranch so wonderful,” says Story Wiggins, the lead designer on the project. “Our goal was to embed the buildings further into what is this existing epic landscape.”
Here’s how Terremoto achieved their subtle redesign.
Above: A photo of the nearby coast that the Terremoto team took as part of their research.
Before any sketches were drawn or plants chosen, the Terremoto team familiarized themselves with the Sea Ranch property and the surrounding area. “We would go on hikes to see what we really loved and what felt good,” says Wiggins. “We were trying to mimic what’s there in a very basic way, and not getting too fancy with it.” Terremoto didn’t just make a list of the plants they saw in nature, they noted the patterns in which they grew and even studied the way that rocks were scattered in the earth. Wiggins suggests that any home gardener could do the same by going to a piece of preserved wilderness near their own home and taking notes and photos.
