Hello, Donna,

I cannot remember the names of all of the evergreen bushes I put in last fall. A few of them are: Red Tip Photinia, Mahagony, Santolina, Heavenly Bamboo, Parney's Red Clusterberry, and Cotoneaster. Ceanothus is evergreen. Dianthus stays green during winter, but doesn't bloom. Scabiosa stays green and will put out a few flowers. Butterfly Bushes will stay green unless it gets really cold. And, as you say snapdragons often stay green, as do hollyhocks.
Lorna

I know what you mean; we don't get much snow here, either, and when we do, it doesn't stay pretty very long, lol.

Does candytuft (iberis sempervirens) perform well out there? I find it to be one of my favorites here in an eastern zone 7 garden. It's more a ground cover, staying below 8" in height, evergreen, adaptable to varied soil/water/light conditions, low maintenance and pest/disease free. Covered with small white flower clusters for several weeks in mid to late spring, it makes a fine edging, lovely with spring flowering bulbs coming through. I don't know that I'd go so far as to call it "bones" (I usually reserve that for woody plants), but it helps my gardens hold their visual structure in the wintertime, while giving me some much-needed green. A variegated liriope has many of the same qualities, and purple flowers in late summer.

A plant need not be evergreen to provide structure and winter interest. Ornamental grasses come in all sizes and colors and are great for winter interest. Red Osier Dogwood is a deciduous shrub - with stems that turn vibrant red in winter. The contorted branches of "Harry Lauder's Walking Stick" (corylus avellana contorta) are fascinating (I'll have one of my own someday). Winter reveals the deep green, thorny branches of Trifoliate Orange (poncirus trifoliata); spring brings fragrant white flowers which develop into small tart fruits that can be used to make marmalade. Shrubs like witchhazel and quince provide winter flowers. Hellebores bloom at various times of the winter, depending on variety; all are evergreen and some are at least as lovely just for their deep green foliage and form. For ever-changing interest as the seasons progress, you'll find some deciduous shrubs and small trees that have lovely spring flowers (attracting butterflies and bees), vibrant fall color, then winter interest and color in the form of berries ... which also provide food for birds ... something else to look at in the garden!

Please check to make sure plants are suitable for your area and not invasive.

Do you have any public gardens nearby to visit? That's a wonderful way to get inspiration, and seeing a whole plant, in a garden, is so much more helpful than a cropped image of part of a plant.

Sorry I rambled on so with my list; hopefully it will help you see you have lots of options.

Diane

Donna,

I'm really fond of berry producing bushes and Possumhaw Holly is my favorite. This particular variety of Holly loses all its leaves during the winter, but they are replaced by mounds of gorgeous orange/red berries. In general though, Hollies are both evergreen and berry producing. I have some Japanese Holly that is incredibly hardy and puts on a nice show of red berries against green leaves in the winter.

Nandina is another favorite, and not only do they produce bright orange berries, but also retain their green leaves during the winter.

I really like the jolt of color that berries give a winter garden.

Marilyn

Thank you for your suggestions. I do have some of the things that you mentioned. My nandina was just planted from 1 gal pots so it is too small to be seen from a distance yet. I plan to get some ceanothus, it does get big enough to fill my needs and I love the blure flowers. I have two butterfly bushes but I need more. I am winter sowing both scabiosa and some ornamental grasses. One of my biggest problems is the sheer size of the garden, it's over 100 ft long. I am hoping to get enough plants in there that it helps to crowed out the weeds. Before we built our house here, it was nothing but an oat field.
Donna

You probably have room for some larger shrubs...Carissa Holly gets as big as three by three feet, but mine are still smaller than that after several years. Dwarf burford holly has lovely berries and is evergreen. Some daylilies are at least semi-evergreen.

Other things to consider...interesting bark looks good on winter bare crepe mrytles. Garden art is fun. Pretty towers or trellis' add vertical interest. Naturally, every garden bed needs a bird bath. Maybe a stone path, too.

Here is a link that might be useful: Creative Soul

Nothing will ever really "crowd out" weeds. It's best to deal with them first, then plant. Mulching makes it easy to keep up with the weeding by discouraging all but the most persistent (save for creepers, like Bermuda grass or polygonum).

What's your Sunset zone? How much frost do you get? How much sun or shade? What's the soil like, and how much do you want to water?

100' isn't really that long - except by our urban standards, LOL - but for interest you want to think in "layers". Many beginning gardeners fail to do this and it's the real dividing line between a garden that looks good all year round and one that seems dull half the year. Having an evergreen groundcover like iberis won't help if what you're missing is top height or medium height plants.

It's hard to give you an idea of plants without some indication of how wide an area you're talking about. I've got the typical urban lot with beds chopped up by various paths of concrete, so some of them are 15' wide and some are 12 inches!

For instance, here's a 10' wide front yard bed. We built a center berm with concrete blocks to give height to a Meyer lemon standard planted in the middle. In back is a red-flowering leptospermum to "frame" everything. This photo is from mid-December 2007, so there is very little in bloom. Color mostly comes from foliage and fruit. There's a few iris and a euryops, but even the leptospermum in bloom against the house, is fairly subtle:
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Now, compare that to the gaudy show the garden makes in April and May. This is from last year, so there's a pink Argyranthemum where the yellow-flowered Euryops is now; but otherwise everything's pretty much the same.
{{gwi:635819}}

Note on the far right, towards the corner of the house, we added height with a trellis that gets covered by a coral-flowering passiflora I have to cut back every winter before it takes over the neighbor's nandina and strelitzia. There's also a Tibouchina urvilleana for medium height/evergreen/bloom, and a variegated sweetgum for top layer height (gets to 30-35' which is perfect for the city) in that bed against the fence. I put the trees on the right side because our property slopes so steeply downhill, we need the height to balance out the overall view of the property when viewed head-on.

Here's another section that may give you some ideas. This is a long narrow stretch, approx 145' downhill, south-facing. Alongside the house, the bed is less than 2' wide; against the fence opposite, the bed is 12" wide. These measurements follow the length of the house and back porch (45'), then widen slightly in the back yard itself.

Here's March 2007: cannas and grass cut back, roses just leafing out, no bulbs showing:
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Here's May 2007 as a comparison:
{{gwi:635823}}

Beautiful as April and May are, there remains something good to look at all year round. Pelargoniums, passifloras, osteospermums, abutilon, salvia, clivia, ferns, erysimums, helichrysum, hellebore, limonium, cestrums, plectranthus, tecomaria, stacchys.....whew, the list goes on and on. But without knowing more about your siting requirements, not much of this will help.

I love your gardens. The cottage garden that I have been working is about 100-120 feet long and about 30 feet wide at the widest. There is a 12' wide dirt road running behind it with an oleander hedge on the other side of the road, We live in a very rural area. We have 5 acres that we built our home on 21/2 years ago. The soil is sorta sandy loam with lots of gravel and river rock in it. At one time, the Sacramento river would flood our valley and deposit lots of loam and rock. We have a seasonal creek on the other side of the road and we hope to landscape that area someday. Right now the creak area is a thicket of tamerask(invasive) and bamboo. I have another 50' in front of the cottage garden that I am trying to put in some more beds. Other then that, the land is flat and bare right now. It once was an oat field. We have a lot of work ahead of us and we are doing all the work ourselves. Our Sunset zone is 9. We live in Orland CA with lots of orange/olive groves in the area.
Donna

"We live in Orland CA with lots of orange/olive groves in the area. "

Hi Donna, even though we live half a world apart, our climates sound very similar, as pines, olive and orange groves are the most usual around my place too (dry Mediterranean zone 10 climate).

I know the feeling of bare dirt in Winter too well, so my garden is a constant struggle to add Winter interest, so I would second all of the advice given above. In my garden I keep adding not only evergreen plants, but also deciduous ones with interesting bark or color. For example, red twig dogwoods (I have just added another one to a border). Bear in mind that with red twig dogwoods (or yellow ones) a background of evergreen shrubs enhances the effect immensely, so you may wish to plant in stages - evergreens in the background, then the dogwoods, then smaller plants in the front and in between.

Good evergreen backdrops are strawberry tree (arbutus unedo), dodonea, brooms, photinia, oleander, camellias (in shadier areas), grevillia, laurustinus (viburnum tinus), all kinds of hollies, cotoneaster, New Zealand tea tree, box, yew and other conifers. For color and architectural interest add mahonia, red or yellow twig dogwoods, nandina and variegated hollies. In between those you can sow annuals such as poppies, nicotiana, sweet allyssum, nigella, cosmos, hollyhocks and honesty, which will give you the cottage look during Spring and Summer, but can live happily in the middle of the shrubs, which will provide you with Winter interest.

Crape myrtles are very pretty in Winter too, with their naked gnarled branches and peeling bark. Last year I planted an amelanchier (serviceberry), which is also a multi-season interest plant.

Last but not least, all types of lavender do well in dry Mediterranean type of climates (even in my clay soil!) and they bloom year round. All in all, with careful consideration and planning, you can have a really wonderful Winter garden in a mild climate, if only you think beyond the traditional Spring and Summer approach.

Let us know what you add.
Eduarda

Boy, that's a sizable area to be gardening all by yourself! I'd really consider what hardscape you want to put in to reduce (a) the amount of sheer year-round gardening work you would need to do to maintain it, and (b) reduce your overall watering/fertilizing expenses.

We took our landscape install in phases - it was easier and cheaper to think of it in "blocks" while maintaining a general overall plan to make everything consistent and flow together in style.

One useful source for flatland landscaping ideas is the Better Homes and Garden website. It's cluttered with ads and pop-ups, which can be irritating, but they have many useful ideas and drawings which are very helpful.

Even if you DIY, it will take $$$ to landscape something so large. Half of our hardscape was already there; we just had to connect it all smoothly. Despite this, I'd estimate we spent at least $8K landscaping less than 2500 sq. ft. of gardens(total does not include concrete hardscape of some 1200 sq. ft. already existing), over a three year period.

This was a considerable savings over the $65K it would have cost to have a pro do the design and install. But it was still a sizable investment in the end. Mind you, these are SF Bay Area prices, but still, square footage = $$. No getting around that, really.

Note that our total lot size is only 5600 sq. ft. Your single 100' bed is almost the size of our entire lot, house included. I'm retired and have all the time in the world, but I personally would not want to spend so much time maintaining such large beds for the rest of my life. I like gardening, but install a garden and it never ends. Do you really want to have that much responsibility?

Cottage gardens are wonderful, but they take more time and work than almost any other style. With 5 acres you need to really consider how much actual free time you are going to have to deal with such large proposed cottage beds. Just weeding alone would take you several hours each week!

I'd urge you to plan carefully because there is nothing worse than watching your prized plants grow up and realize you should have placed them 2' to the right (or left). Or that Plant X would have looked so much better and contrasted beautifully against Plant B, but right now they're 20' apart. Or that your expensive Plants D are all croaking, because it's too far to drag the hose around and what you really needed was a nice shady spot with a bench there instead!

Your soil sounds fine; I'd just mulch heavily. Good luck and remember, it's better to spend more time planning than planting!

I have had the wrong plant for that spot problem. I had some Black Eyed Susans come up from seed in front of my snapdragons. I will have to move all of them before spring. I have another area that they will look great in. I am so grateful to have installed drip hoses when I first started. Now when I add a new plant, I just add on to it. I am retired, so I do have the extra time and I can get help from my 2 DGD. My DH digs all my holes for me as I have 2 knee replacements that don't like me to do a lot of digging.

I spent most of last spring/summer working in this garden. We have not done anything with most of the 5 acres. My DH keeps it mowed and we lose a lot of area to the creek and the thicket growing along side of it. I have been working in one part of the yard at a time. I am putting in some paths and bird feeders/baths to add some interest. I also have a small umbrella/table & chair set. The garden is coming along some now, I just think that it needs some evergreen plants to add some winter interest.

Thank you to everyone who had helped with their suggestions.
Donna

Donna, we are in luck here in Orland. Diane Stout has opened Prickly Pear Garden Center and She is very knowledgeable.
Seem Like I have been living there.
I just did a YouTube Interview of her Garden Center

Here is a link that might be useful: Visit to our Local Garden Center

Ah, you live near Chico. You can grow just about anything in that location. Bonus is you have so many butterflies in that area. You definitely need more buddleia :-)

And you say you have a creek? I would suggest planting California pipevine (aristolochia californica) along side, under the trees. Great host plant for the Pipevine swallowtail and the flowers are so interesting.

Edna