With the mercury levels set to stoop below freezing again, gardening enthusiast Anya Lautenbach has named her top five flowers to grow in your garden this winter
A gardening expert has revealed the top five flowers that every gardener should be nurturing in the coming months.
As temperatures are set to dip below freezing again, gardening enthusiast Anya Lautenbach has shared her top picks for your garden in her new book, The Money-Saving Gardener. She insists winter is still a great time to make the most of our gardens and listed her favourite blooms: “I personally love hellebores, Algerian iris (Iris unguicularis), Hepatica, the climber Clematis cirrhosa, and Erica carnea.”
While she acknowledges that winter isn’t typically associated with flourishing flowers, she suggests there are plenty of other ways to keep our gardens looking their best during the chillier months. The expert added: “And, when flowers are relatively few, it’s worth focusing on other areas of interest, like the textured bark of Prunus serrula, which looks magical when catching some late afternoon sun or meeting the frost, or the fiery coloured stems of dogwoods.
“With a few well-chosen additions, there’s no reason for your garden not to grab your attention, even in the depths of winter.” It seems one of Anya’s winter flower choices is particularly popular, with legendary former Gardeners’ World presenter, Alan Titchmarsh also singling out the Iris unguicularis as his favourite to grow during the cold season, reports the Express.
In his book, The Gardener’s Almanac, he described the flower as: “It sits like an unruly rug of linear leaves for most of the year, and then up through that haystack of foliage in December and January push spears of palest amethyst, which open to reveal the most delicate of lavender blue iris flowers that look as though a puff of wind would destroy them.”
In addition to growing some of your favourite blooms, Anya also highlighted the importance of preserving gardens during the frosty weather, advising: “Order seeds for next year (if you were unable to collect your own in autumn), take hardwood cuttings of fruit and ornamental shrubs, take root cuttings of plants such as echinacea and verbascum, keep pruned branches to use as plant support in the spring and store tender plants in a frost-free environment.”
