Winter struck with a vengeance this week. There can’t be much more to blow down. Leaves, twigs, branches, the odd small tree, every container plant – they are all lying around waiting to be cleaned up. Then it turned so cold that I didn’t feel like venturing out between showers. Next came the frost and it remained cold. Sometimes our long autumns lull me in to a false sense of security and I never fail to be surprised by a wintery blast.

I was rung by a journalist working on a story about winter gardens and it made me focus on what we strive for in the winter garden. Despite my reluctance to brave the cold, we garden for twelve months of the year here. In spring it tends to be a pretty tree and shrub garden with the addition of lots of spring bulbs. In summer we aim for the lushness of the subtropical look with touches of the English herbaceous tradition. In autumn it is the detail of the autumn bulbs along with the splashes of colour on the plants which colour up well (the metasequoia was a breathtaking orange this year).

And in winter? The tracery of the deciduous trees against the sky (and aren’t we lucky in this country that we keep our bright clear light and blue skies all through winter?), the promise of buds fattening on the spring flowering trees which is a particular feature of deciduous magnolias, the delight of the citrus trees (the mandarin closest to the house is particularly decorative with its very dark foliage and branches weighed down by masses of bright orange fruit but the lemon tree is also worthwhile) – and flowers. The winter garden lacks the mass flower power of spring and it lacks the lush, well furnished look going in to summer. There are some largish areas which can be quite open where the summer perennials have gone dormant. But it is still possible to manage a pleasing winter garden which provides colour and flowers.

The nerines and cyclamen are bravely flowering on. Nerine alta has a particularly late and long flowering season. It is not the common pink nerine which is bowdeni, but a smaller flowered lookalike with spidery, frilly blooms. It lacks the colour range, size and oomph of the more spectacular sarniensis hybrids but they have long since finished flowering. Cyclamen hederafolium is the first to bloom in autumn and its marbled leaves provide an attractive winter carpet, but it is cyclamen coum which is taking over the flowering.

The luculias are coming in to flower. These winter flowering shrubs are very rewarding if you are mild enough to grow them (heavy frosts will kill them). The bright sugar pink of the smaller growing Luculia gratissima “Early Dawn” is a bit too candy floss in colour for my taste but it looks fine if it is surrounded by lots of dark green. We sometimes use luculias as woodland shrubs. They can get a bit stretched and leggy over time if you don’t keep up with pruning and pinching them out but even “Early Dawn” looks good in the sombre shade areas. My favourite is luculia pinceana “Fragrant Pearl” which is one we released some years ago, a selection from seed imported by nurseryman and author Glyn Church. It is large growing and has very large mostly white flowers which are strongly scented and the flowering season can last three months. Luculia pinceana “Fragrant Cloud” is another large grower and has not opened her flowers yet but the shrubs are a mass of buds. This one has very large, fragrant flowers in a pretty soft almond pink with a white centre. Almost too exotic for winter (but not quite).

While many camellias are opening their first flowers, it is the early flowering sasanquas which are a mass of blooms at this time. Do not, dear Reader, betray your ignorance by ringing your local garden centre and asking them if they have “the white sasanqua” in stock. Worse is asking for the white snacker, snackwa, sanasqua, sanqua or countless other variations. The sasanquas are a botanical group of camellias. They come in white, pink, pink and white bicolours and very deep pink verging on red and they all have different names. The white sasanqua look has been much beloved by magazine landscapers and is likely to be planted by those who have standard Iceberg roses and clipped buxus hedges, but there is not just one white sasanqua camellia. There are many to chose from – Mine No Yuki (very slow to grow initially), Silver Dollar (bushy and small and also slow to establish), Early Pearly (gorgeous flowers but not always enough of them), Weeping Maiden (suitable for espalier and hedging) , Yoimachi and the list goes on. Two of the commonly requested varieties, tsaii and transnokoensis, are not even sasanquas. If you are going to go in for the cliched clipped white sasanqua look, then at least carry it off with style and ask instead, “Which white sasanquas do you have in stock?”

We were interested to realise in Italy last year that while we see camellias as flowering plants all winter through, in colder climates they are an early spring mass display. I think I prefer the colour we manage all winter.

The understated hellebores are coming in to flower. These are a gardener’s plant, I suspect. As most of the flowers nod downwards, you have to bend to lift them up to look. True you can plant them on a raised bank or bed. Or Mark recalls the man he knew who had a mirror on the end of a long stick to reflect the flower (perhaps better not to glue mirrors to your shoes – might be misinterpreted if you forget to change your footwear before going to town). Hellebores are a really easy care plant for a range of situations from sun to partial shade and they blend well into the woodland look. The flowers have a subtle simplicity which I find quite charming. The classic way to display picked hellebores, by the way, is to float them in an open bowl.

The leucojums are coming in to flower. You may know these as the paddock snowflake, but there are good garden forms, particularly leucojum vernum “Gravetye Giant”. They have a long flowering season and are worth a place in the garden if you don’t mentally group them with arum lilies and the old double daffodils commonly found on abandoned sites of early homesteads.

The first of the lachenalias have opened their flowers as have the first of the cymbidium orchids and the early clivias. All around the garden, the spring bulbs are pushing through. In the cold of winter, they are a wonderful reminder that we are not that cold after all and that our winters are indeed short.

As an aside, Mark is a little more serious about his tropical pineapples than I thought and we managed to solve a mystery this week. For many months, when I went to the supermarket he asked me to keep an eye open for pineapples which have not had their green tops cut off them. But they always seem to have been attacked with a cleaver on top, nowadays. When I bought a ripe pineapple this week, it became clear that we can not be the only ones asking why. Dole Tropical Gold now have a label which carries the information, “To help protect New Zealand’s unique environment, the crown of this delicious extra sweet pineapple has been removed.” So there. Clearly tropical pineapples were set to become the next escapee and noxious weed in our environment. Up the river road by the Wanganui, perhaps? Mark was pleased he had some saved from times past to form the nucleus of tropical pineapple project.