COLOUR FOR ITALIAN GARDENS IN WINTER

Which plants can be used in Italian gardens in winter ?

Using leaf form and colour to create colour in the Italian winter garden

Gardening in Italy should be a fun experience and the winter is no exception!
Italian gardens are teeming with colour from Spring to late Autumn. From the array of spring flowering bulbs, then all the shades of the magnificent Iris, through to the flower colour of antique roses - the growing season is alive with colour in Italian gardens. However the dull autumn and winter are seasons that can also yield some amazing surprises for the garden designer in Italy.

While the autumn leaves are falling and the dull days of winter begin drawing in, most gardeners in Italy tend to feel that the colour and joy of spring and summer is slipping away from them. However, although the intensity of the colour range is clearly reduced in this period, some subtle yet nonetheless colourful emotions can be relayed using alternative Italian garden design methods. Take, for example the feminine prowess of the humble cyclamen, who can leave the onlooker stunned by her simplicity in a period that apparently offers little in the way of colour in the Italian garden.

Rising like a snake and unfurling menacingly, the cyclamen never ceases to amaze as she emerges from the dark, cold autumn soil, tense and stimulated in this the 'quiet' season! Almost defying and challenging natures hardship she then presents us with a flower of delicate beauty, so rare in this season of melancholy that one cannot help but admire her determination and beauty. Cyclamen persicum merges in autumn and soon forms wide swathes of soft colour in the form of minute flowers held on tiny stems. These stand strong for around 2 to 3 weeks and then fade back into the plant's underground tuber. This jewel of wild flowers enjoys dappled shade, which it finds underneath large deciduous trees. Thy can be found on banks, in woods and hedgerows.

Native to Turkey and the Mediterranean region from Spain and even up to Iran the wild cyclamen flowers in the autumn, produces leaves in late winter and ingeniously disappears underground during the hot Mediterranean summer. This enables the cyclamen to live in the harshest of dry environments and produce stunning flowers in a period when there is very little other lower colour.

The Italian vegetable garden (l'orto) offers the gardener or garden designer in Italy a vast selection of leaf colour and form, even in the middle of the bleak mid-winter. Just the brassicas alone provide some very interesting leaf colour and form. After rainfall the leaves of the cabbages, Iris and Stachys lanata (Lambs ears plant) suddenly become illuminated by droplets of rain that appear like jewels emerging from the leaves and create interest in this, supposedly the dullest of seasons.

Some varieties of Mediterranean plants also offer the Italian gardener and designer some stunning flower colour in the form of the winter flowering Iris (Iris unguicularis)

By Jonathan Radford

CONTACT ECOLOGICA HERE FOR PROFESSIONAL HELP ON THE CREATION OF ECOLOGICAL ITALIAN GARDENS