Tips on Creating A Beautiful Winter Landscape

In Indiana, your yard is subject to all four seasons of the year, so why not design your landscaping to be beautiful in every one of them? Winter can be an especially gorgeous season if you know what to plant and what design features to include. At our previous home, we designed our landscaping so we could enjoy it in every season. Here are a few key elements of our yard that made it a beautiful and engaging winter landscape:

As a family, we are in love with water features, and over time we built two ponds and three waterfalls on our property. The ponds were full of koi fish and lily pads most of the time, but in the winter the waterfalls created beautiful and fascinating ice formations. Even when winter was a little warmer than usual, the running water and sparkling reflections of the sun provided a fresh beauty that never got old.

Our gardens and plant beds were home to a wide variety of plants and trees, both of which made our landscape beautiful in winter for a number of reasons. Having many types of plants affords you unusual and pretty sights as snow falls on top of them in many different ways. Certain plants will also provide you interesting shapes, textures, and colors in winter that they wouldn’t in warmer months. The trees we planted are prime examples of this. Japanese Maples show off their red bark and pleasing architectural shapes in winter. We had 25 plus varieties of Japanese maples; some were weeping, some were strongly vertical, and some were squat. Each different shape added to the landscape around it and created its own point of interest.

Our evergreens provided something more vital to our yard than just their lovely colors and textures. They sheltered the birds. Birds don’t have much to eat in winter, and will come flocking to your bird feeder if you keep it filled with birdseed. Watching birds flit and fly all over our yard amongst branches and snow was a delightful winter pastime for us.

By paying attention to textures, shapes, and colors of plants, we created a yard that displays beauty in winter. We loved walking through our garden to see how snow and ice have changed it, taking pictures along the way of bright red cardinals. Now that we have moved, we look forward to creating a new winter oasis.