Winter Container Garden Ideas

Plant Cool-Season Vegetation

• If you live in U.S. Department of Agriculture Hardiness Zones 7 and warmer, where winter low temperatures don't drop below 0 to 10 degrees F, you can plant a variety of cool-season annual flowers or vegetables in your containers for winter. Choose plants for the light exposure the container receives. Charles Loeb, Jr. writes on the Mother Earth News website that he often grows attractive leafy cool-season vegetables in winter in containers. He selects from various lettuces, Swiss chard, radishes, spinach and kale for his designs. Blend cool-season veggies with classic cool-season flowers, such as pansies and violas, snapdragons and wallflowers. Consider underplanting these annuals with tulips or daffodil bulbs so by the time winter ends, the bulbs are poking their leaves and flowers up among the tufts of lettuce and pansies. If you garden in USDA zones 9 or 10, where frosts are rare and light and your containers get abundant sunshine, grow annuals such as Gerbera daisies, annual phlox, pinks and sweet alyssum.

Display a Decorative Shrub

• Regardless of your expected low temperatures, you can place a container-grown shrub inside your patio container over the winter months. Choose a plant that is winter hardy in your region, perhaps rated to withstand the conditions one zone colder, because containers in winter are subjected to more cold than plants in the ground. Choose a shrub with persistent berries (holly, for example), one that blooms in winter (such as a camellia), or displays colorful or exfoliating bark (red osier dogwood). Dwarf conifers, holly grapes, heavenly bamboo and small rhododendrons have lovely foliage. Mask the soil in the shrub's container with mulch or decorative items, such as sprigs of evergreens, pinecones, plastic Christmas ornaments or gravel.

Make a Frozen Arrangement

• In parts of North America where winters are long and temperatures do not get above freezing from December to February (USDA Zones 1 through 5), you can stuff a container with cuttings of winter-interest branches. Moisten the soil in a container in late fall and cut branches of evergreens (pine, spruce or broadleaf types) to anchor upright in the container's soil. Mix long sprigs of holly or other berried branches, dried oak leaf branches, Autumn Joy stonecrop, ornamental grass seed plumes or dried hydrangea flowers in with the evergreens for an attractive, woodsy arrangement. When complete, place the container outdoors where the temperatures will freeze the soil, locking the branches tightly for the winter. As long as temperatures are subfreezing, the needles and leaves on the branches will persist for weeks, eventually drying and dropping once late winter or spring arrives. Use artificial sprigs of holly or other berries from a craft store in your design if these plants do not grow in your cold-climate region.