A lifeless and dull winter landscape can make the winter seem more bleak. With a little planning, you can transform a landscape into a thing of beauty regardless of the season or the weather. Here’s how to achieve year-round color in Bergen County, NJ, with plants from our wholesale nursery.
When choosing plants, think about different seasons so that all of the plants aren’t showing their best attributes only during spring and summer. Include a variety of plants that flourish at different times of the year.
Depending on the landscape design scheme, you may wish to maintain a more monochromatic landscape and make it visually interesting year-round through the use of textures; or, you may wish to create a landscape that offers ever-changing color with a mix of evergreens, deciduous trees and shrubs, flowers, grasses, and groundcovers.
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1. Evergreens
Evergreen trees and shrubs make a frozen landscape feel alive. Evergreens come in many varieties and colors ranging from deep green to bluish green, to variegated golds and silvers. Add even more visual interest by mixing various evergreen textures and plant sizes, from majestic blue spruces to elegant cypress trees and wax myrtle shrubs.
2. Berries
Shrubs and trees that bear berries add color and attract wildlife year round. Holly, crabapple, chokecherry, barberry, dogwood, winterberry, and cranberry bush are a few examples of fruit-bearing trees and shrubs that brighten a winterscape and attract birds and wildlife.
3. Bark
After a tree or shrub has shed its leaves, you can really appreciate the textures and colors of the bark. Choose maple, cherry, dogwood, oak, ninebark tree, red and white birches, St. John’s wort and ironwood for a colorful and texturally interesting landscape all year.
4. Foliage
Fall is of course a riot of color, with bright reds, oranges and yellows to brighten the landscape. But you can add a lot of visual interest to a landscape throughout the year with varied foliage color. Choose a variety of ornamental trees to provide visual interest both during the spring bloom and throughout the season: beech trees with variegated purple-and-green leaves; cherry trees with small, dark leaves; crabapple with purple leaves; and lindens with broad, light-green leaves.
5. Flowers
With so many perennial and annual flowers to choose from, consult with one of our nursery experts to choose flowers that ensure seasonal color from the first crocuses to peek through the last of the spring snows to fall-blooming asters.
6. Ground Cover
Add color to a landscape with ground covers such as bearberry (a glossy, green-leaved groundcover that produces white/pink flowers in spring and bright red fruits and reddish leaves in fall and winter); creeping juniper (an evergreen ground cover well suited to sunny slopes); partridgeberry (a hardy 2 inch tall ground cover with dark green leaves, pinkish flowers and bright red berries in winter); and lowbush blueberry, which bears a bounty of blueberries in August as well as bronze fall foliage.
7. Ornamental Grasses
Mugwort, sage, blue grama, feather reed grass, mace sedge, tufted hair grass, and purple tufted grass are a few ornamental grasses that add texture and color to a landscape all year. They look amazing set in front of tall and dense evergreens.
Choosing the right plant for the right location is vitally important to ensure a thriving and beautiful landscape. Consult with our experts who will guide you through making the best selections for the unique needs of each landscape design and location.
Related: ADDING COLOR TO A BACKYARD WITH PLANTS FROM OUR LANDSCAPE NURSERY IN BERGEN COUNTY, NJ
