How to make your garden an inviting haven over winter

“A garden in winter is the absolute test of a true gardener,” wrote the plantswoman and designer Rosemary Verey in her 1988 book, The Garden in Winter. While many of us will ignore the slumbering borders and wait for warmer weather to get out and tackle jobs or spend some time outside, the hardiest among us will embrace it. As Verey goes on, “If our gardens are to be more than graves commemorating summer’s beauty, we must start by using our eyes.”

Unlocking the pleasure in a winter garden is all about rethinking your perspective – the days may be short and the glorious bursts of sunshine few and far between, but there is also unparalleled beauty and the magical low winter light illuminates every detail. Structure becomes key: the layout and layering of plants, the forms and tracery of trees and skeletal hedges, the beautiful bark, the iridescent tufts of ornamental grasses, and glossy berries – it all plays a role.

While it can feel instinctive to hunker down and ignore the garden until the first shoots of early spring appear, with a little effort the garden can provide moments of joy in the coldest months of the year, and with just a few tweaks it can deliver a more festive welcome to any holiday guests too.

Tidy Up

Many of us prefer to leave borders alone over winter and enjoy their decaying structure through the cold months, which provides valuable habitats for wildlife and a seed source for many garden birds, too. But tidying up the paths and terraces around them will radically improve the overall look of the garden, and act as a sharper contrast to the slumbering borders. Collect leaves from anywhere you don’t want them and bag them up to rot down over the winter; left bagged up, these old leaves will eventually transform into a crumbly mulch to apply to the borders. Niwaki’s fleece-lined winter gloves, £12, and sturdy leaf bag, £32, are your friends for winter work; if you have a lot of trees, then old builder’s bulk bags are useful.

Sweep and weed any paths, too. Gardener and author Arthur Parkinson takes a rigorous approach here: “I scrubbed all our paving stones by hand a few weeks ago with a washing-up bowl of hot water mixed with a lot of bicarbonate of soda and vinegar and using a good kneeling pad,” he says. “Hard work on the hands, but it did make the garden look refreshed.”

Go foraging

Creating festive decor outside doesn’t require much skill, and costs nothing if you have places to forage for pine, larch, ivy, mistletoe, holly or any other evergreens you can lay your hands on. Lay branches over table tops, or make outdoor garlands which will stay fresh for weeks in damp, cool weather. The Scandi florists provide endless ideas here with their knack for creating beautiful decorations from found and foraged plants; Claus Dalby’s month long series of tutorials (on Instagram and YouTube), made in collaboration with florist Hanne Utoft, is a must-watch, with inventive and beautiful ways to create decorations using foraged materials.

Sharpen hedges and shrubs

In a similar way to tidying up, sharpening hedges and topiary now will bring a graphic contrast to borders in winter. It’s also perfect timing for pruning deciduous hedges now that the leaves are mostly fallen. You can create more graphic shapes by exposing the trunks of shrubs, creating beautiful silhouettes in the winter garden. Time this seasonal pruning with making wreaths and garlands and you will also have piles of material to use – pittosporum, evergreen hebes, yew, birch catkins and beech twiggery with rusty-coloured leaves all make great material for wild festive decorations.

Plan for winter

When adding new shrubs, hedging or trees for the garden, consider the winter value too. Garden designer Butter Wakefield has filled her London garden with plants that provide as much value in winter as summer; yew pyramids through her borders add vital structure but there are also winter-flowering shrubs by her back door, including evergreen Osmanthus x burkwoodii and Viburnum bodnantense – their scent adding an additional dimension. In her front garden, guests arrive to the scent of Sarcococca hedging and white camellias, which will flower prolifically until February. “It’s absolutely sensational,” says Wakefield, who planted the camellias on a whim. “It was a chance thing but they’ve been a great triumph.” In December she runs fairy lights down each of her hedges to make a more festive arrival for guests.

Bring the inside outside

Even if you don’t spend long outside, you can still create welcoming corners for hot drinks over the festive season, especially if you have a sheltered area. Some sheepskins thrown over seating sets a cosy scene; a heated blanket will make sitting al fresco infinitely more enjoyable (Stoov’s Big Hug chair pad, £119, can be used on chairs or across a bench and will heat up at the press of a button), or add a fire pit for some heat.

Light it up

Subtle lighting will improve your garden year-round, but it comes into its own in winter when the darkness descends; opt for warm low light rather than anything too bright, which can be garish and also disruptive to wildlife. Single uplighters placed beneath focal plants or trees will provide drama, while lights close to the house help to create a warm and welcoming effect. Simple lengths of festoon lights look effective above windows or strung across a terrace (Lights4fun has options that are solar, battery or hard-wired), while panels of LCD net lighting look effective over topiary. If you have the patience, lighting up the branches of one specimen tree can be dazzling. Outdoor candles also add to the atmosphere – Arthur Parkinson prefers them over other light sources, using metal tealight holders with tall glass sides that will protect the flame. Claudia de Young sells elegant outdoor Danish candles in tin vessels (£40, littlegardenshop).

Make a winter table

An outdoor table can become a revolving display of small pots of hellebores, winter-flowering violas, cyclamen or bulbs that can easily be moved into the house for forcing, as well as a temporary gathering of festive foliage. Wakefield has two tables in her back garden which she dresses by arranging seasonal foliage including different pines, eucalyptus, pussy willow, cornus stems, seed pods into vintage red metal buckets. “It does bring an enormous amount of interest and joy and I think they are such a quick and easy win,” she says.

Pots already planted up with spring bulbs can also become part of the scene if they are topped with something green. Parkinson dresses his bare pots with a carpet of velvety moss, raked up from the lawn. “This is much more cheerful than a blank expanse of compost,” he says. “And I think this dressing makes pots of bulbs less of a magnet (visually) to squirrels. If they are troublesome then I’ll stick in lots of little stems of cut holly as a thorny defence.”