Two Festive Plant Ideas for Winter

Need some inventive and fun ideas for the festive season? These winter plant ideas are a great place to start

Winter Jewels™ Amber Gem

Meet Helleborus Winter Jewels™ Amber Gem (zone 5 to 8), a deer-resistant delight for your winter garden.

With its double-flowering, blushed-red blooms, this perennial from Terra Nova Nurseries makes a charming addition to quaint cottage gardens and looks great nestled in the understory of mixed beds.

Don’t allow it to dry out between waterings and be sure it has adequate drainage in rich, fertile soil.

Container to Garden Plants

Avid container gardeners love to hijack plants destined for the garden to enjoy them in a container for a year or two. This transient approach keeps containers looking fresh and varied.

It also means you can pamper a smaller shrub or perennial for a few years before putting it in the garden with larger neighbours.

Broadleaf evergreen shrubs, such as skimmias, shine in winter. Most types of skimmia have separate female and male plants. Both are required for fruit.

Male plants have showier flowers, so they contribute good looks as well as pollen. If you can’t accommodate two plants, look for hermaphroditic Skimmia japonica subsp. reevesiana – it produces showy (inedible) red fruit that can be snipped for holiday decoration.

Skimmias are hardy only to zone 7, so container-grown plants need extra protection if temperatures plummet; tucking it into a garage corner or keeping it beneath a burlap bag should do the trick.

Originally published in BC Home & Garden magazine. For regular updates, subscribe to our free Home and Garden e-newsletters, or purchase a subscription to the magazine.