Winter Sketching to Help with Spring Garden Touch-Ups

Will your garden be just the way you want it to be when spring rolls around? I doubt there is a gardener who would answer “yes”. Gardeners know that each year brings the need for everything from garden touch-ups to complete overhauls. There is always something we want to fix or adjust… no end to the work. And if truth be told, that is part of the fun of gardening.

So, this year, what will you change about your garden? If you find yourself not yet knowing exactly what, you might want take a good look at your winter landscape right now, while virtually nothing is poking up from the soil and there is little to commit to. This is an ideal time to sketch your ideal garden.

Sketching garden beds in winter generally is quite a study in “flat”. Sure, you’ll have your evergreens and shrubs in sight and ready to provide your basic framework, but your perennials will not enter into the picture. And, if you are like me, you will find that quite liberating.

When the first spring weather arrives, warming my garden’s soil just enough to get my perennials to peek out from their winter hiding places, I feel committed and nostalgic, too attached to my existing garden design to change much. But if I get out into the garden to draw in February and early March, or if I use photos taken at this time of year, the mid-winter landscape provides the base for what I can sketch in. This allows me to add to, alter, or completely re-do a bed or two. My existing perennials do not tug at the heartstrings, prompting me to keep them in place. Instead, it is a clean slate, and I can sketch and erase, sketch and erase, until I get things just right… or right as they can be for the year ahead.

This method is working for me this winter as I am trying to improve a deciduous border that has been less-than-perfect for a few years now. When I first installed the plants in this border, which is backed by a plain and simple fence, I had plants of different heights. There were tall Irises against the fence and towering Daylilies near them to take on the blooming responsibilities once the Irises had done their duty. I left ample space around these two (especially the Irises) to keep them blooming well. I dug in smaller-sized plants in front, including a few medium-sized Hostas of the sort that will do as well in sun as in shade. Great border, right? Well, not exactly.

As time went on, this border became crowded… something that is easy to fix. But it also became same-sized. The Hostas started out looking good each spring, but they exceeded their goals of being medium-sized and grew to almost the same height as some of the perennials at the back. I added a Rose or two, to create the back-of-the-border height I desired, but the Roses did not do well. Space was too limited, and the Roses could never get the air circulating around them enough to truly thrive. But keep that border intact, I did…. I was attached to the perennials I had put in place.

This year, my drawing of that border has me re-thinking its depth: I am going to make it much deeper in order to give my plants more room to grow. For the back of the border, I am considering a few small evergreens to accompany some well-behaved and slow-growing shrubs, both of which will add visual interest to this border all year long. The shrubs will lose their leaves but still maintain their twiggy forms, and there will be more than flat ground to see in the winters to come. Then, come spring and summer, these shrubs can provide a backdrop for long-blooming perennials, with colorful annuals and interesting ground cover to round out the look.

This border, reconfigured in my sketches, will have varying heights… some tall background plantings with smaller plants in front, and a mix of tall-and-small in other areas, simply to intrigue the eye. Looking at a list of long-blooming perennials, I am not sure if my Irises will remain in this border. I may relocate them and change things up completely, opting for tall perennials that will keep blooming through spring and summer. Now, this is key: I love those Irises. But sketching this part of my yard at a time when they are cut back and in their winter form, I am not as attached to them. The flat wintertime plane that lies before me allows me to start from scratch. I am drawing in the edge of this border differently, opting for an irregular edge rather than a straight one. As mentioned, the border’s depth is different. And I find myself sketching in plants that are giving me the varying heights and visual interest in winter that is better than what I have had in place over the past years.

Will this time of looking, considering, and drawing make my garden border and other beds perfect? Well, no. If I thought that would be the case, I wouldn’t be a gardener. Gardeners know better. But will it give me the freedom to redesign things so that I add more long-blooming perennials, so that this border contains plants of differing heights, and so that it has better visual interest across all months in the year? Yes, I think so.

Give it a try, yourself. Gaze at the clean slate that appears before you, take up your pencil, and then start drawing the garden of your dreams. The image you create will give you a blueprint for work to be done in spring and summer. And because the sketching is done now, before beloved plants start poking out of the soil, you will feel liberated enough to dream big.