Category

Gardens

Nov 01
0

Putting your garden to bed in winter? Not so fast!

By | Gardens, Plants, winter | No Comments

Late season clean up

Putting your garden to bed is a phrase I use a lot. I even used it last fall to sell my garden services to a lady of a certain age who is no longer mobile enough to work in her garden. She agreed, and I took two sessions late in the season to put her garden to bed.

I cutback all of her perennials, I power sheared some of her shrubs, I weeded, and I picked up all of her leaves from the fall. It looked nice and neat, and she was happy. That was it. Now we just wait for spring.

Or do we?

Winter garden

Now, when my son played soccer in North Vancouver in late January, I picked up a copy of the Financial Times (January 24-25, 2026) because I knew that the weekend edition publishes a garden column. And it was worth every cent.

Lauren Indvik writes in her column on pages two and three, that we can also enjoy our gardens in winter. Winter gardens can have lots of colour and fragrance. Aha. All of a sudden, I realized I was getting schooled.

The column mentions one ingenious garden at Cambridge University Botanic Garden, which uses tall yew hedges and a dip in the walkway to lock in the winter fragrance.

And here’s a good tip: you don’t need a huge garden. You can strategically place your pots at entrances or behind benches, where you’ll notice the fragrance.

Closer to home

Closer to home, I’m used to enjoying the fragrance of mass-planted Sarcococca plants. You sometimes notice the fragrance before spotting the plants. But, you can do better. We’ll get to Indvik’s plant list in a second.

First, let me tell you about my walk today. I did a huge two-hour loop, finishing with coffee and a visit to my neighbourhood Garden Works store. As soon as I walked around the building, I saw the plants for sale with their labels shouting “fragrant”. So Indvik was right.

There you go, this should be a good place to start. Witchhazels, Daphne, and Sarcococca. Indvik also likes Katsura trees (Cercidiphyllum japonicum), Mahonias, Winter honeysuckle, Camellia and Viburnum bodnantense.

If you have budget and space, you can plant some of these plants in your garden and start enjoying your new winter garden. I think it’s a brilliant idea. Why cutback your perennials in late fall and then wait until spring, when you can enjoy winter color and fragrance.

Feb 01
0

Why beech trees are hard to forget!

By | Gardens, Trees | No Comments

Hands bleeding

One of the trees we looked at during my winter plant identification course walk was a huge weeping beech tree (Fagus). It’s located near the main building inside the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens. It’s a beautiful, massive, weeping specimen.

In our multi-family strata complexes, where there is less space available, it’s common to see columnar beech specimens which stay upright and narrow. All you have to do is prune them back into shape once in a while.

It wasn’t hard to find the leathery brown leaves; there were piles of them by the rock wall. So I collected a few and now I’m pressing them in one of my books at home. Looking at leaves in winter obviously helps you identify the tree. Assuming the leaves are really from the tree you’re looking at. Always collect as much information as you can.

Buds

Tree buds are obviously the key identifying feature in winter. And here I have a lot of bad experience. Years ago in White Rock, my task was to thin out beech trees that had previously only been power sheared. It was a bit slow because beeches have this habit of fusing their branches.

That’s another key identifying feature; and it makes pruning slow and annoying because the branches you want to remove, may be fused with neighboring branches. That makes it difficult to extract them and could lead to unintended large holes in your tree.

Blood on my hands

By far the worst beech bud feature is its sharpness. I didn’t pay any attention to this in the beginning. I knew it was a beech tree and I made a lot of mess. So when it came to removing the branches I lost a lot of blood when my fingers collided with the sharp buds. I couldn’t believe how sharp and dangerous the buds were. I literally had blood on my hands.

That’s why it’s very unlikely I will ever forget beech trees and their sharp, pointy buds. Beeches are beautiful trees, yes. I especially like their fuzzy seed capsules and the seeds inside them. We found some in the leaf litter at Van Dusen. But do be careful when handling beech branches because the buds are super sharp. I think you need heavy duty gloves to handle them.

Beech tree buds
Jan 25
0

Van Dusen Botanical Gardens are worth a visit in winter

By | Education, Gardens | No Comments

Winter gardens

Last weekend I took a winter plant identification course at the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens in Vancouver; and I took full advantage of free access to the gardens. The $30 course consisted of one hour in-class session and one hour outdoors. As soon as it ended and the group disbanded, I went back in.

And it was glorious! It was sunny at lunchtime on January 11, 2025, and there weren’t any crowds to fight through. It became a nice mental break for me because I’m normally on the go during the season, usually seven days a week. Now I had the gardens almost to myself so I walked it. Here’s what I saw.

Observations

Close to the main building I saw ornamental grasses nicely tied up. This not only looks like a fun project, it allows the grasses to remain standing. In regular strata landscape maintenance work, these grasses are sheared into oblivion as soon as they start to flop; and then there is nothing to look at. Nothing moves in the breeze.

Moving on, I came to a patch of evergreen ferns and, I’m proud to say, I didn’t need the plant tag because I knew the botanical name well: Asplenium scolopendrium or Hart’s Tongue fern. It’s an interesting fern, well-worth adding to your garden.

For the longest time I couldn’t remember its botanical name so I started writing blogs about it until the name stuck. Asplenium has something to do with the sun and once I get that part out, scolopendrium follows. Learning botanical names is a struggle which is why I paid $30 for a winter plant identification course!

As you walk through the gardens, you notice tons of leaf mulch. This is a botanical garden, not a strata multi-family property where everything is blown clean with backpack blowers. The leaf mulch protects the soil and whatever creatures over-winter under it.

You will also notice that most perennials are still standing. This allows birds to enjoy the seeds and it gives us something to look at. If you get lucky, you’ll see the stalks and flower remnants covered in frost.

You don’t have to cut everything back as soon as it’s spent. It can wait until spring. It definitely wouldn’t make sense in a botanical garden because visitors need to see something in winter.

Conclusion

If you’ve never been to the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens then definitely find the time to go. Summers are more exciting and much busier but I thoroughly enjoyed my winter visit. It’s a great place for a walk, alone or with your friends and loved ones. There is a cafe and you can buy souvenirs in the gift shop.

To see YouTube shorts from Van Dusen Botanical Gardens please click here. Don’t forget to like and subscribe to my West Coast Landscape Professional channel.