Winter Flowering Plants – Adding Colors to the Cold Landscapes
Winter flowers will add a much needed color palette to frosty winter landscapes. Unless the area you live in suffers from sub-zero temperatures, many hardy flowering plants can be planted before winter and render your garden with colorful blooms during the colder months.
Winter Flowering Plants – Cold Friendly Flowers
It is quite a challenge to keep a garden full of blossoming plants during frosty winter months, but there are some hardy winter flowering plants that can thrive throughout this period. Most summer and spring plants are dormant during winter when snow or frost arrives. But you need to plant them while the ground is soft before frost appears, or in late winter when the ground has thawed out. Some bulbs that bloom in winter are star flowers, crocus, glory in the snow and hellebores, but they must be planted during fall. You can grow some winter flowering plants like Camellia sasanqua that has certain ‘winter’ and ‘snow’ variations that can survive upto -4 degree F. Winter heaths, cousins of the Scottish heathers are one of the hardiest winter flowers and can survive temperatures upto -25 degree F. Chinese juniper, winter honeysuckle, winter daphne and Iris unguiculari can also be planted in your garden. However keep them away from cold winds or snow fall, preferably in front of a low wall or screen and make sure any occasional bits of sunlight falls on them.
Allium Giganteum – Ornamental Onion
Like the name suggests, the allium gigantuem comes from the onion family and is specially popular for its huge round purple flowers. Hundreds of tiny purple flowers cluster together to form the football sized flower head that sits atop long stems, with oval shaped leaves that grow near the ground away from the flower heads. The stalks have no leaves on them and the plant can even grow up to 6 feet in height. The flowers are white or pink when growing but turn bright purple when fully grown. It is easy to grow allium giganteum and because of this they are much sought after plants, especially as a backing to other flowers or be used as a border liner. Since the leaves aren’t really attractive, you can add some ground covering plants near and let them cover up. These plants grow through September to December. Giganteums are also wonderful because children just love them and so do butterflies. However remember that strong winds will harm the pretty flower heads, so plant them in a sheltered area away from winds. They love direct sunlight and will die in too much rain or if over watered. So you need to be careful if planting them in your garden or yard.
Winter Jasmine – Star Showers
Considered to be vines or viney shrubs, winter jasmine is the perfect winter plant. Though it does not have even a trace of its cousin the Jasmine, the winter variety can be seen stretching on walls, trellis, fences and arbors during even the coldest winter months. The pretty little yellow flowers grow in profusions, leaving starbursts of colors in your yard or garden. Not really climbers by nature, these plants are actually creepers and you need to give it artificial support if you want to embellish your arbors or other such structure. This hardy plant will grow in any kind of soil and is equally unfussy about where you plant it, whether full sun, shade, mixed, etc. So if nothing else fills your garden with color during winters, this jasmine variation surely will. Some other winter plants you could include would be Fairy primrose, the starry white Paper daisy, Luculia with its large pink flowers and Polyanthus.