The quiet argument for winter gardens

Anyone can make a garden look good in June. January is the honest month: the flowers are gone, the light is low and sideways, and all that is left is structure, bark, scent and whatever you had the foresight to plant for exactly these weeks. When we say a design should work in all four seasons, this is the season we mean.

Six things we plant for January

• A multi-stemmed birch — white bark against a dark hedge is the cheapest drama in horticulture
• Cornus in quantity — the red and amber stems light up the moment the leaves drop
• Sarcococca by the door you actually use — scent should ambush you on the school run, not wait at the end of a wet lawn
• Hellebores under the bare shrubs — flowering through the worst of it, heads up in every thaw
• Snowdrops in drifts, not dots — a hundred is a start, a thousand is a sight
• Evergreen structure — yew, box or beech hedges that hold the room together when everything else has gone to ground

None of this costs summer anything: the birch casts light shade, the cornus sits quietly green from May, the hellebores vanish under the geraniums. A winter garden is not a different garden — it is the same garden, still speaking when the year goes quiet.