Designing a Garden with Year-Round Interest

The bones come first

Most gardens are planted for the moment they are bought, which is usually high summer. Six months later the borders are a collapsed brown mush and the pots are full of dead annuals. Designing for year-round interest means accepting a straightforward truth: from November to March you are not gardening with flowers. You are gardening with shape, bark, berry and seedhead, and the plants that supply those things need to go in first.

Think of evergreens as the walls and furniture of a small space. They hold the composition together when everything else drops away, and they give the eye somewhere to rest. In a courtyard or a narrow town garden, three or four well-chosen evergreens will do more work than twenty herbaceous perennials. Aim for a clipped shape at roughly a third of the height of the space, then repeat it — repetition is what makes a small garden feel deliberate rather than cluttered.

• Clipped yew or box for crisp form; if box blight is a worry locally, use yew, Ilex crenata or a neatly trimmed Lonicera nitida.
• Pittosporum tenuifolium for dark stems and wavy, glossy leaves that catch low winter light.
• Sarcococca confusa for deep shade and a scent that will stop you in your tracks in January.
• Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii for lime-green flower heads from February onwards, on a plant that looks good in December too.
• Ferns such as Polystichum setiferum and Dryopteris erythrosora, which keep their fronds through all but the hardest weather.

Bark and stems for the darkest weeks

Once the leaves are gone, stems become the main event. A well-placed dogwood or birch is worth more in a small garden than any amount of summer bedding, because you actually look at it when there is nothing else to look at.

For fiery winter colour, Cornus sanguinea 'Midwinter Fire' is hard to beat, with stems that shift from gold at the base to coral-red at the tips. For glowing green, use Cornus sericea 'Flaviramea'. Both need cutting back hard in late March to about 15cm (6in) from the base to keep the colour vivid — the youngest stems are always the brightest. On a three-year rotation, cutting a third of the stems each spring, you get colour and height at the same time.

Where there is room for a small tree, Betula utilis var. jacquemontii gives brilliant white bark, and Acer griseum or Prunus serrula offer peeling, polished bark that looks superb when lit from below or caught by a low sun. Even in a pot, a multi-stem birch will earn its keep for a decade.

Berries, hips and haws

Berries do two jobs: they carry colour into the coldest months and they feed the birds. In a small garden, plant them where you will see them from a window, because that is where you will be doing most of your winter looking.

• Malus 'Evereste' — a compact crab apple with white blossom, then orange-red fruit that hangs on well into December.
• Cotoneaster horizontalis — excellent trained against a wall, with herringbone stems and a dense crop of red berries.
• Ilex aquifolium — plant a female variety such as 'J.C. van Tol' with a male nearby, or you will get leaves and no berries.
• Callicarpa bodinieri var. giraldii 'Profusion' — those improbable metallic-violet beads. Plant three together for reliable fruiting.
• Rosa moyesii — flagon-shaped hips the colour of sealing wax, held on bare arching stems.

Leave the berries on the shrubs rather than tidying them away. A garden that feeds blackbirds, fieldfares and redwings through the lean months is a garden that is alive in February.

Let the seedheads stand

The single easiest change you can make is to put the secateurs down in autumn. Seedheads and grasses are the texture that carries a border through to spring, and they look better in frost than they ever do in August.

Leave Hydrangea paniculata varieties, sedums such as Hylotelephium 'Herbstfreude', echinacea, phlomis and verbena standing until late February. Grasses — Calamagrostis 'Karl Foerster', Miscanthus sinensis and Stipa tenuissima — should be left untouched until you see new growth pushing through at the base, usually in early March. A dusting of frost on a miscanthus panicle, backlit at four in the afternoon, is worth more than most flowers.

If you want the tidy look, cut half the border back in November and leave the rest. You get structure without losing the wildlife and the winter silhouette.

Scent where you will meet it

Winter scent is wasted at the bottom of the garden. Put it by the back door, along the path to the bin store, or beside the gate you use every day.

• Viburnum × bodnantense 'Dawn' — pink, intensely fragrant flowers on bare wood from November to March.
• Lonicera fragrantissima — untidy, but worth it for the scent of its creamy winter flowers.
• Hamamelis mollis — ribbon-like yellow flowers on a shrub that slowly becomes a handsome small tree.
• Daphne odora 'Aureomarginata' — needs sharp drainage and sun, and repays it generously.

Making it work in a small space

Small gardens succeed on layering and on viewpoint. Decide which window, doorway or chair matters most, then build the planting so that something interesting sits in that sightline in every month of the year.

In containers, raise pots on feet to keep drainage free and reduce frost damage to terracotta. Group them closely — three or four pots pushed together hold moisture and look like a single generous planting rather than a scattered collection. In autumn, layer bulbs in a large pot: snowdrops and Cyclamen coum at the top, narcissi in the middle, tulips below. Wrap terracotta in bubble wrap or hessian before the first hard frost, and move the most tender pots against a sheltered wall.

Finally, mulch and feed in spring rather than autumn, and resist the urge to cut everything down at once. A garden with year-round interest is not a garden with something in flower every week. It is a garden whose shape, bark and seedheads were chosen deliberately, so that even in January there is something worth stopping for.