The transplanted gardener: I can see the North Pole from my house
Yellow plants warm the garden in a cold climate.
When you live in a cold climate, plants with colorful leaves or flowers make all the difference.
Photos courtesy Craig Summers Black
Winters in the heart of the heartland do not "heart" me.
I am a warm-blooded soul who hadn鈥檛 shoveled snow in exactly a quarter of a century before I moved here.
I remember hauling furniture into our new Iowa abode when our neighbor (we had exactly one at the time) came over and posed a question: 鈥淒on鈥檛 you have you a winter coat?鈥�
Actually, no, I didn鈥檛, which was probably made abundantly clear by the fact that I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt 鈥� and it had been snowing for a half-hour.
His advice to this newbie: 鈥淲ell, you better get you one. Because when the wind comes up in the winter, there ain鈥檛 nothing between you and the North Pole 鈥檆ept that barbed-wire fence.鈥�
This is not my colorfully crafted attempt at dialogue 惫茅谤颈迟茅. Those are his exact words.
The first two winters were the hardest 鈥� especially since it went down to 28 below (-33 C) a few times. This was not in the manual. It says here that I live in USDA Zone 5, and Zone 5 is supposed to bottom out at -20 (-29 C). Ha. One day the high 鈥� the high, I鈥檓 telling you 鈥� was 14 below (-25C).
It was hard to believe that any plants of any kind could survive this kind of weather.
To , I decided to make sure to include two things in my new landscape:
1) Evergreens. Besides hardscaping, this gives structure to a winter garden. And it is a reassurance on a cold winter day that there actually is a garden out there.
2) Yellow. Yellow flowers, yellow foliage, anything bright and cheery (and, preferably, early) to announce the impending arrival of spring.
Yellow evergreens 鈥� like the (Chamaecyparis pisifera aurea) 鈥� have a nice warm glow in the landscape when surrounded by snow.
The sunny foliage on the deciduous (Gleditsia triacanthos 'Golden Sunburst') is positioned dead center a ways off the kitchen window to showcase its spring announcement.
Innumerable gold-leaved perennials also add oomph to warm-weather anticipation: coral bells, dead nettles, bleeding hearts, spiderworts, , euphorbias. clematis, corydalis.
But the focal point of the front yard (see first photo above) is my Yellow Butterflies magnolia (click at the right bottom of the first photo to see a closeup of its flowers). I have an insufferably long wait in this climate for this tree to bloom. But that makes its blossoming only that much more rewarding.
What I鈥檓 into this week besides gardening: 鈥淪olid Air鈥� by John Martyn. Martyn died recently, and the news sent me back to this ethereal English electro-folk rocker. I could not have made it through college without this album.
Performance video: 鈥溾��
Hear: 鈥溾��
Note: Read Craig Summers Black's previous post about gardening in a cold climate by clicking here.