Grow it, Minnesota

The Winter Garden with Cathy Rees

• Mary Schier • Season 2 • Episode 1

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Welcome to another season of Grow it, Minnesota!

In this episode, author Cathy Rees talks about her new book, Winterland: Create a Beautiful Garden for Every Season  (Princeton Architectural Press, 2021).  She explains what to think about as you design a garden and landscape that will offer beauty and more all year.

We talk about the importance of texture, structure and light as well as ways to create habitat and enjoy watching birds and other critters in winter.

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SPEAKER_00:

Hello everybody and welcome back to Grow It Minnesota. I'm your host, Mary Shear, and we have been on a little bit of a break the last few months, but we're back because there are so many great gardeners that I want to introduce you to in 2022. And we're kicking off the new year and the new season with Kathy Reeks, who is the author of Winterland, Create a Beautiful Garden for Every Season. Kathy believes that we in the North can have gorgeous gardens even in January. So let's get into the interview. Well, Kathy, I'm so glad you're here with me. Thank you so much. Um now you did not start out as a northern gardener. You weren't, as uh my daughters say, born on the northern tundra, correct?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I actually had kind of an interesting history growing up, but I've always lived pretty much in the north. Um, I was born in New Jersey, that's not really that far north, but I ended up uh moving around a lot as a as a youth and uh spent a lot of time in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan before um moving as an adult to New York and then to Maine. So that's sort of my trajectory.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, so you were farther north than I thought you were. So, well, that's good. So, what got you interested in garden design and specifically winter landscaping?

SPEAKER_01:

I've just always been fascinated by plants, and I guess I didn't even realize how interested in plants I was until finally in college took a botany course and um realized they were talking about plants that I had known from my childhood. The smell, the the way they looked. I was like, wait, I know these plants. You know, I remember these. And I even remember asking my mom once, did we have irises when we lived in New Jersey? I moved when I was four because I smelled the irises, and that smell just transported me right back to New Jersey, like a four-year-old. So I guess I've always been paying attention uh to plants. And when I first uh bought my first home, I suddenly had a garden. Well, not a garden, I had well, I had the irises, and um I had mostly lawn, and then I just kind of started getting interested in what else could I have besides grass, and then really started getting into gardening at that point. And then um I continued on at school getting a master's in ecology, which kept me interested in plants, but then um then after moving to Maine, I ended up uh starting doing some work in some gardens and then started working on design. Um, my undergraduate degree is in environmental design, so I've always had that kind of interest. And then I sort of put the two things together once I got here to Maine.

SPEAKER_00:

And what is your current garden like? Is it large, small? What's that?

SPEAKER_01:

Depends on your definition of garden. Um it's uh it's about nine acres, our property, and um we basically cut in the woods, we basically cut down what we needed to do to build a house about 25 years ago and put in a driveway and those kinds of things. And the rest of it, all the disturbed area around those activities became garden, and the rest of it is just kind of the natural woods. So um it's actually not that big. The actual gardened areas are not that big. Um, I do have a pretty substantial vegetable garden, including fruit trees and grapes and raspberries and stuff like that, um, which is not close to the house, it's close to the road. Um so I do have that type of garden as well. And when we uh when I decided to garden around the house, I decided it was not going to have any lawn there because I actually don't like mowing very much. And um so that all of those spaces basically turned into more of a woodland garden kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00:

Tell me a little bit about um your interest in winter landscaping. So because your book is in is really about there's a lot about fall, but also fall and kind of winter landscaping and how to enjoy your garden when it's covered in snow, as yours is and and mine is.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, I I just got to thinking how you know we put our gardens to bed in October, whenever it is, and um we basically don't really think about them. Yeah, we like order our seeds and stuff for vegetable gardens in the winter, but you know, there I just feel like we just kind of most people just kind of forget about them. And I just feel like it's um a real missed opportunity because when the leaves fall, it's like a whole nother garden appears. And why don't we focus more effort on that garden rather than the one with the flowers and the insects and all the life that's like abundant and lush? We have this pared-down more simple garden in the winter that could be just as like dazzling and beautiful, but in a very different way. So I just felt like it's a real missed opportunity that we don't ever really talk about gardening for winter. Um, yeah, so you know, I'm and I'm not that into flowers, um, so and it doesn't really seem appropriate that flowers would be happening in the winter, so I don't really focus on um, you know, how to have more flowers in the winter. It's really about all the other things that go into making a garden a beautiful place, and then thinking how do those things interact with our um with the lighting that we have in the fall and winter and spring, and and how do they interact with the snow and the frost and all of those um beautiful sights that occur when you wake up in the morning to a frosty winter day, and it's nice to have something to look up there and see and feel invigorated by and maybe even want to get out there instead of oh, it's so cold out and want to stay in, or like around here, a lot of people go someplace warmer for the winter.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, we have a few of those around here too. So yeah. So, what when someone is thinking about designing their garden for winter, what are the first things you should do as you approach that process?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, for me, I uh you know, I recommend that people really think about the places that they use and see most in the winter. Now, some of those are gonna be, you know, just getting from the car to the house and things like that. Like, why not make that passage more beautiful? Um, also like to the wood pile, to the compost pile, to the bird feeder. Is it safe? Is it um you know full of ice? You know, what kinds of things can you do to make your experience of the place you need, places you need to go outdoors better? Both safety and in beauty as well. And then, secondly, um, like a lot of northerners, I do spend a lot of time indoors and looking out the windows. So I recommend that people choose a few windows that they are likely to be looking out during the winter when it's daylight, or or maybe sometimes special times at night, uh, that you can improve the views out of those just those couple of places rather than thinking about like the whole garden all at once. And a garden is really something that's never finished, so you can just keep working on one window at a time every winter, or a couple windows at a time every winter from the kitchen sink, or the place where you have lunch, or the exercise room, or whatever it happens to be, uh, where you actually have something to look at during those, well, for us, it's like about seven months of winter or something.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, same here. So you talk a lot in your book about structures, um, which can be can be plant structures, but a lot of it is human-built structures. So, what's the role of of those kinds of structures and and are there particular types that people should really think about incorporating if they can?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, for us, uh keeping our gardens uh safe from deer is really important. So fences are an important component, important structure that you might want to think about in your garden. First of all, to have your summer garden and your winter garden both be a better place and less frustrating for you. So fences and uh enclosing areas can also be really nice in the winter because our view kind of gets it first of all, it opens up because the trees have lost all their leaves, but when the when it's snowing out and maybe it's drizzly or foggy, our view gets a lot more closed in, and then by defining a more closed-in space with a fence or another structure, you can uh bring that view in and focus on just those areas for winter enjoyment. Fences can make great backdrops to things, like for plants specifically. Things that don't move, like a fence or a wall, can look great with some ornamental grasses or something waving in front of them. That juxtaposition between the movement of the plants and the stability of the structure is always nice. Structures can be colorful, that's another way you could bring color into the garden if you really want to see some vibrant shades out there in the winter. So fences, walls, like say you have a garage wall and putting up a trellis that can have a plant or even just the remains of a plant on it, can be extra appreciated in the winter when the sun hits and then you see the shadow of the trellis behind it. Any kind of wall like that makes a great kind of screen for shadows and a backdrop for the activity, whatever the garden activity that's happening in front of it. So I like to have structures in the garden for places to go, functional, like to keep the deer out, things like that. Um it can make they can provide destinations. Like in in the winter time, maybe we don't really want to go out there too much, but there's always those like early days of spring when the sun's shining and it's warming up, and you just can't wait to get out there and just soak up some of those rays. So having a place to go, uh like a pergola or a bench, even, um, is a great way to just get out there and um enjoy that those first rays.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And they also seem to give your eye a place to rest. We we installed a pergola in our former garden, and it what had been a very wide open scene in winter, suddenly there was a place to look. There was just this thing, it had snow on it, and you know, they give your eye something to go to, and I don't know. Once we put that in, that whole garden just looked better, in my view.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So some people use uh sculptures or things like that too, and that's all great. It gives again, it gives you like a focal point or a destination or just a place for your eye to rest, and an object where you can kind of observe the conditions, you know, it's gonna be icy after a rain and covered with snow or glistening with frost, it provides that structure to uh hold those elements of beauty in the winter.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. Now, another thing that people almost always, if you're in the northern climates, they say, put in a lot of evergreens. You know, you want to have conifers. Oh, so why is that? I mean, why do we want to do that? And also, do you have some suggestions of evergreens that would work well in not large landscapes, sort of one-third acre lots or or even smaller than that?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I know people always ask me, what are your favorite winter plants? And then they're surprised when they don't say any evergreens. Because, and I'll just say this up front, you know, like often they look the same in the summer as they do in the winter. So I like that change and like shuffling things up and getting things to look different. Of course, a lot of them do change color in the winter, and that's one thing you need to be aware of when you're when you go shopping in the nursery in the summer, you're finding this juniper, say, that has this kind of bluish-green cast, bring it home, and then you find out in the winter it turns kind of a bronzy color or microbiota or any of those other uh there. Well, there's tons of junipers to choose from. And they're I I find they're all small, they're all pretty, well, low-growing anyway, um, like the horizontalis or the communis, those are our two native ones here in Maine. And there's tons of varieties of each one. They both look great all winter long. They're easy to prune and keep uh in check, keep the size in check with other things. Of course, that's always our big challenge, planting things so they look good the day we plant them and then have them still look good five or ten years later. So anyway, uh junipers are ones I would really recommend. Um a lot of there's been so much plant breeding in the last, you know, whatever, 20 years. There's miniature everything now. You can get a miniature hemlock, miniature pines of all species and varieties, and they grow a lot slower than a typical canopy-size pine or hemlock. I'm not gonna say they're never gonna overgrow their space, but there's a lot out there to choose from. Um, there are the ewes around here, we call them deer candy. Yes, we have deer. Recommending those. But they, you know, they're great. They're again very easy to prune and keep in whatever size configuration that you like. We have the uh red cedar, the Arbor Vidae. Again, there's been a lot of plant breeding with those as well. Some of them don't get so large, different winter coloration is possible as well.

SPEAKER_00:

Those are, however, bunny candy. Yeah, I mean, I have some, and you have to put it put a fence around them basically in winter.

SPEAKER_01:

A lot of things, well, here it's deer as well. Because we don't have we have the horseshoe or the snowshoe rabbit here rather than the cottontail, but they um they do eat do a lot of eating as well.

SPEAKER_00:

They do, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, you said you didn't really that evergreens weren't on your favorite winter plant list, so what is?

SPEAKER_01:

That's always hard, you know. Like, what's your favorite child? Um, they're all my favorites. Uh well, I do really like the witch hazel. And most people say, well, it's because it blooms late in the winter, and I'm like, Well, that's part of it, but I just love the shape of it, it has just such a beautiful open shape, when it's grown in the shade. Um, it is kind of like an umbrella, and it kind of provides like a lower canopy in the garden, and that openness allows you to really appreciate the branching pattern, and it doesn't take any effort really, it just does it naturally on its own. I mean, every plant does have its own natural shape, and if you put it in a place that's appropriate for that plant, it will probably attain that shape. So, witch hazel, winterberry holly, of course, because of the red berries. Also, you know, the berries are just great to look at, but also that day when suddenly like the cedar wax wings discover all these uneaten berries and suddenly cover the shrubs with uh their activity, their sounds, and that's just a wonderful moment if you can catch that. Um, that the winterberry does have uh there are male and female plants, so you do need to have the females, uh plenty of females if you want to have lots of uh berries. Um, I like a lot of the ground covers, like bearberry stays really nice and green in the winter with tinges of red on the stems. I find it to be very festive and hardy. That's a plant that can really take a lot of different conditions. I mean it is like tough as nails. It can grow in like pure sand, it can grow in the sun, it can grow in the shade. Um, I find that's a really valuable uh plant for well for every time of year, really. Yeah, mostly I'm saying all these shrubs and woodies because those are the things that are so important for the winter, where they really um really have a presence and really uh combinations of different shrubs can look great together. I'm thinking about their shapes and how they uh one can be over the other or under another, and how they can combine to make a beautiful scene is one thing I really enjoy doing for the winter garden, especially. In the summer, it they just it's kind of like all just a lot of green. Um, but in the winter you really see the stems and the shape, and I think that that is so rewarding to have that beautiful composition.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And one of the most interesting sections of the book, I thought, was the one where you looked at different contrasts in the garden and how they how important they are in the winter, such as you know, the sun and shadow, or or um, you know, things that are wild and then things that are cultivated nearby, and sort of in in sort of an encouraging people to embrace these different contrasts that are out there. So why don't we talk a little bit about sun? Because obviously in the north, we know that sun gets a wildly different angle, you know, now compared to what it's what it is in June, for instance. Just wildly different. How do we design around that or what think about that?

SPEAKER_01:

I like to think about how we can catch the rays of the sun to make something exciting happen in the winter. In the summer, the sun is so high, it's just um shining down, and every shadow is like at the base of the plant. But in the winter it's so low and angling across, it creates really interesting shadows. So there's the light and the dark together, and that contrast creates patterns that you would never see, or you could never see in the summer. And then you, if with a little bit of snow cover, it really becomes dramatic. And especially if the ground is uneven, it can warp that shadow and create even another kind of pattern that's unexpected and of course very interesting. I feel like we need to like kind of broaden the our ideas of the garden and the things that we're looking at in the winter. You know, in the summer, it really is a lot about the foliage and the flowers, but in the winter there's all this other stuff, and maybe it's really just developing an appreciation for what's going on out there anyway. And the lighting is just so dramatically different. The color is different. We have really much more prolonged sunrise and sunsets in the winter, or it seems that way because the sun is never that high on the horizon to begin with, and it also seems so much more blue in the winter.

SPEAKER_00:

And I I don't know if there's any science behind that or if it's the snow or whatever, but there's a lot of blue flying around.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, the color. And not only that, it just uh makes the whatever color foliage is remaining in the garden that much more interesting to look at. Like the twigs of some shrubs might have like an orangey hue, or in some lights they might just all look brown, but then at the sunrise or sunset, it illuminates them in a way that makes them so orange or um red even and adds all this additional color to the garden. All we need to do is be out there or be looking out there in order to appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. It seems like a lot of what you're recommending is people sort of put your phone down, go look out at your look out your window, look out, look at your just really absorb the landscape that the way it looks in the winter, and think of ways to enhance it.

SPEAKER_01:

And I think it'll speak to you too. Once you start doing that, you're gonna say, wow, well, maybe if I put a tree there, I would have a focal point, I would have something to look at, or maybe if I put a shrub under that small tree, I could make an arrangement that would look better when the perennials are all gone. Um, so yeah, it is a lot about just kind of tuning our appreciation to what's out there. I feel like you know, we all need to reconnect with our landscapes, uh, both the wild ones and the ones that we're cultivating. Because as humans, we have, yeah, we've gotten way too far into the phone and technology, and we've become so isolated from the natural world. And I feel like that garden is the perfect like gateway to the natural world for a lot of people. And if we can broaden our ideas about the garden and what we do out there and how we do it and when we're out there, it can really enhance our lives more than we can ever say. I mean, so many studies have come out about our connection to nature and how important that is for our mental well-being and our physical well-being, and just why shut that off in the winter? Let's just keep going.

SPEAKER_00:

That's that's right. That's right. Um, so uh just uh one two more things I wanted to talk with you about. The first is one thing I loved about your book is that in addition to giving all the beautiful pictures and the great advice on design, there's also a lot of practical information about dealing with snow and ice. And you are a huge proponent of pushing foundation plantings away from the house. Um, why should people do that?

SPEAKER_01:

Foundation plantings are usually put in the wrong place to begin with, they're usually too close to the house, and then they end up causing a lot of problems. Around here, the we have a lot of humidity in the summer, you probably do too. All that humidity caught amongst the plant, and the foliage is not good for the siding in the house or anything like that. So, just for purely practical reasons, uh getting a lot of that uh foliage away from the house is always a good thing. Secondly, in the winter, you can't see the plant that's right in front of the house because you're inside. So, why don't you put it somewhere where you can appreciate it? And people who are passing by can appreciate it too. It'll just maybe be a little bit closer. So you can create a space between yourself and you know whatever else is out there by moving the foundation plantings out and then thinking about how you can garden in that intervening space. Is that going to be lawn? Is that gonna be perennials? What's gonna happen there in the summer? But in the meantime, uh you've you've moved those foundation plantings out, they're not there getting bombarded by snow coming off the roof and cause a lot of extra trouble with pruning to try to keep them in size or rein them in so they're not rubbing against the house or the roof, things like that. I'm not sure where how we got into that whole foundation planting idea. I think it maybe happened when um we started building a lot of houses in old farmland and they seemed so empty and open out there. And so they thought by putting some shrubs right around the house, it would somehow make them feel more settled in. Um, but I think we should really reconsider that whole idea.

SPEAKER_00:

And then last thing is like, so if we want to add, I mean, I I have a landscape in the winter that's got a gray fence with white birch in front of it, and it's it's you know, those colors look beautiful together. But if I wanted to add a little more color, or if someone wanted to add color to their landscape, what would be a good option for winter to do that?

SPEAKER_01:

As far as plantings go, I think you see you should look for shrubs that have colorful bark, and among those, the dogwoods are kind of the kings or queens of uh colorful bark. With all the plant breeding that's going on, there are um the blood twig dogwood comes in practically every possible shade of red, orange, yellow. Uh, the native uh uh silky dogwood or red twig dogwood both have great winter color. Um, there's the gray dogwood, which, although its name says gray, the twigs are yellow and very attractive. With all of the dogwoods, the new growth is going to be the most colorful. So you do have to think about how you want to manage that for the most optimal color. What I typically do is I'll just go around in the spring and pretty much. out the oldest stems in all my shrubs that are turning a little gray and then they'll push out a bunch of new growth and that will be the the brightest colored foliage or not foliage the brightest colored twigs the next winter. There are a lot of willows that have wonderful colored twigs yellow like chartreuse amazing colors. They also cut there's also red so there are a lot of willows to consider for that. There are trees that have kind of interesting bark like the American sycamore. It's white and you know green or brown and some of everything but just that it has so much going on at once can be so interesting. Other birches have interesting color bark. The um yellow birch and black birch both have uh well one is yellow gold and the other is uh dark like a cherry those are both very attractive um so then there's the berries so of course the winter berry that's a big one there the um high bush cranberry yeah that it usually holds on to its uh fruits very late into the season and they provide this most amazing brilliant red in the middle of the winter and they hang in clusters which is also very attractive or native roses the new growth is also very red and the hips are very mahogany or red colored each species is a little bit different. They're also again they hang on to the fruits well into the fall sometimes into the spring until some hungry birds or um rodents find them sumac again has the staghorn sumac has the beautiful red fruits that stick around. One winter I saw um I think it was uh a paleated woodpecker on a sumac. Like how could it possibly be such a giant bird on one a stem of a sumac getting seeds out of that. So again with all these fruits they're beautiful for us to see but also they're providing all this food for wildlife.

SPEAKER_00:

Winter you can really observe the wildlife a lot better because they're not hiding behind the leaves anymore. Absolutely I know it's that one day in May when the leaves start unfurling and I'm like oh no I haven't I haven't seen all the migrants yet I'm not gonna be able to see them next week because the leaves are coming out well Kathy thank you so much for talking about winter landscaping the book is Winterland and I'm gonna have a link in the show notes um yeah to uh to buy it I think it's available just about anywhere at this point but it's a great resource for those of us who spend a lot of time covered with snow but anyway thank you so much Kathy it's been great thank you if you are enjoying Grow It Minnesota please subscribe follow and give us a review over on Apple Podcasts that really helps me reach more cold climate gardeners thanks again for listening we'll be back in a couple of weeks with another show