Mid-Winter Magic

Mid-Winter's Day - the shortest gardening day of the year. To continue a Moosey tradition, I'm filling my Winter Solstice Report with the most colourful, magical garden images I can find to photograph. All guaranteed taken on this very day. Brr...

Shades of Red

Rose hips and crab-apples are the best winter examples of the colour red in my garden. I grow a lot of show-off rugosa roses, and providing winter colour is definitely part of their job description.

And those jolly, shiny red crab apples are adored by the birds. I spend a lot of chair time watching their antics when the weather's just too cold.

Hot Chocolate, Anyone?

And this year there's a strange reddish rose still flowering in the pale, low winter sun. I think it's called Hot Chocolate, which is a very nice idea on this rather chilly day. Yum!

Yellow - well, well, well! I rescued an odd yellow daisy last spring from the supermarket, planted it, and immediately forgot about it. Not the most auspicious beginning, but guess who's still flowering? I think it's a perennial Helenium. I guess my bright yellow plastic buckets don't really count, though at the moment they're filled with some colourful flax clumps...

Pinks

I grow lots of salmon pink-toned flax hybrids, with names like Jester, Pink Panther, and a family of 'Maoris' - Maidens, Chiefs, and so on. My very best winter-flowering shrubs, Viburnum Tinus, are completely covered with dots of soft pink.

For a splash of bright pink I can still enjoy the English rose John Clare. I wonder if John Clare the man likes winter? He is, after all, a famous poet, and his rose certainly does...

At all times of the year I can find purple pansies flowering, though in mid-winter they're sparsely dotted through the garden. But my eyes get drawn up from ground level by the purple flowering Hebes.

Superb Shrubs

Hebes are superb shrubs - five dollars from the local nursery, and blooming at such a severe time of the year! There is a hebe in flower every single week of the gardening year.

Blue - Hmm... This could be tricky. Blue-toned foliage doesn't count, and we just won't even mention snow, which can look very blue in winter photographs. But I can find three cheery blue garden seats, painted in memory of a holiday in tropical Samoa.

White and silver tones are rather cold to warrant a mention. Winter extras like hail and frost come to mind. Aargh! But the usual white Iceberg rose is still bravely blooming. Brr... What a chilly name!

Obviously my garden is overflowing with every shade of green. Show me a paint chart, and I'll match every second tint with a winter leaf or a blade. But green things can be soooooo - boring? Did I really write that?

I hope you enjoy the colours of Mid-Winter's Day 2008 in my garden - as much as I have.