What to Plant This Spring to Enjoy in Your Winter Garden Next Year

A winter garden is a uniquely beautiful thing, full of surprisingly lovely plants, shrubs, and trees that bring joy and comfort right when you need them most.

Aside from those dainty winter and early spring blooming flowers that we all eagerly await at this time of year, there are so many ornamental plant varieties that bring beauty to the winter garden, even during their dormancy, that deserve our appreciation. With a bit of careful planting this growing season, your gardening can bring so much joy and botanical interest to your outdoor spaces next winter. Your future self will definitely thank you. I’m always in awe of all the beauty that can be found outside around our property, even at this time of year when the outside world seems at its most inhospitable. I’m even able to find quite a few dried blooms and branches to clip and bring inside for beautiful winter floral arrangements. Being able to engage in this ritual, which is usually reserved for the spring and summer, always brings me so much hope and comfort. Here are a few of my favorite plants to grow for winter interest in the garden.

Hydrangeas

If I could give you one piece of advice for your garden, it would be to find a hydrangea variety that works well with the growing conditions in your yard and plant a few of them. Or at least, one very big hydrangea. These horticultural summertime favourites are showstoppers in the warmer months, bring so much joy as dried blooms during the fall, and continue to add a delightful floral touch to your green space throughout the entirety of the winter as well.

How to keep these beautiful garden features looking their best: Emergency First Aid for Hydrangea Problems

Sedum

Sedums are drought-tolerant summer staples,  but I’d argue that they’re even more fascinating and beautiful to look at in the winter months. The succulent-like foliage dies back, and bright, colorful blooms from the autumn fade into a deep brown while maintaining their elegant shape. I love gathering the dried blooms to bring inside for my post-holiday home decor.

Red Twig Dogwood

We have several dogwood bushes that thrive along the banks of our creek. Though the delicate white flowers of these native plants are always a welcome sight during their late spring bloom time, the most exciting development happens in the early winter weeks when their branches turn bright red. I love to prune them back to use in my Christmas porch decor, but I appreciate their cheerful beauty through the snow in the late winter as well.

Tall Grasses

Tall grasses like switchgrass and miscanthus serve so many uses in the garden. They create a charming meadow-like effect when combined with flowering perennials, and they make a bold, modern statement when planted as a single variety en masse. They also bring a billowy, feathery magic to the winter garden as they peek out over snowbanks and withstand the strongest winter winds.

Hostas

OK, hear me out. While hosta leaves will die back by late fall, and you may have trimmed back all the tall floral stems, I’d like to make an argument for keeping the stems in place and allowing them to stay throughout the winter as a soft, sculptural element in the winter garden. The reaching, graceful quality of each stem, even without the trumpet-shaped blooms of summer, bring structure and interest through the snow without becoming worn-looking from the wind. I tried it for the first time this year with a few key plants and have loved the results.

Garden ideas for your outdoor space: 7 Hosta Mistakes Everyone Keeps Making

Boxwood

Evergreen boxwood shrubs are classic foundational plantings that are worth the extra care and attention they require to become well-established. Once in place, they’ll provide decades of healthy, year-round greenery and are the perfect companion to elegant bare branches of deciduous winter trees and shrubs.

Planning for spring gardening: How to Grow Healthy Boxwood Shrubs

Yew

Yews are another familiar favorite that can easily be trimmed and shaped into beautiful garden focal points. They maintain their rich green color year-round, but my favorite thing about them is the way the snow catches on the tops of each little branch. If you have a yew outside of your window, you’ll always be delighted by your view after a snowfall.

Rose of Sharon

Rose of Sharon are absolutely spectacular during their short summer blooming period, but it’s the winter months that I really look forward to. I love Rose of Sharon’s seed pod branches more than anything, both out in the garden, and clipped inside in a vase as interesting, textural decor.

Summer garden inspiration: How to Propagate Rose of Sharon

Ivy

We don’t typically think of ivy as a winter plant, but it maintains its green color, sometimes darkening to an almost burgundy tone, during the winter months. It provides a charming green backdrop to other perennials, like grasses and herbs that keep their shape, and can even be overwintered outside in large pots for beautiful, maintenance-free year-round planters. Ivy requires little sunlight and is famously resistant to pests and insects of all kinds, although it does grow like a weed, so it’s best used in a contained area.

Read next: Houseplants and Happiness – Top Three Mood-Boosting Plants

Lavender

Lavender might be my favorite late winter and early spring plant. This easy-to-grow perennial herb holds its globe-like shape, bringing a feeling of life to the garden during the bleakest weeks of the year, and its grey-green foliage during dormancy is stunning next to the earliest spring bulbs of the year that begin to pop up just before the last frost. Although summer lavender is lovely, I think I appreciate this plant’s contribution to my garden design the most during the coldest parts of the year.

Summer blooms and winter beauty: Lavender Plant Care Guide