6 Plants for Autumn Fall and Winter Interest in the Garden

There are a whole suite of plants that hold onto their leaves for a long time and color up late in the fall. This adds to the late fall and early winter interest in the garden.

I'm kneeling next to one of these plants this is Oakleaf Hydrangea - Hydrangea quercifolia, an American native, it has great fall color. You can see on this plant it's got some yellows, a little bit of orange here and there, it's got purples and reds. This is a wonderful plant for that fall color that stays very late.

Another aspect for late fall and winter interest are berries on plants and this is a Purple Beautyberry - Callicarpa dichotoma. These berries are indicative of the species, you can see the deep purple color. This is a fantastic plant for the late fall and also has a wonderful flower in mid June to early July.

Another good example of exfoliating bark adding the winter interest is our River Birch - Betula nigra here. Notice the cream colored bark with flaking outer parts of grey and brown. The River Birch is much less susceptible to the insect problems that the white birches have in our New England climate.

Another great plant for late fall color is Itea virginica a native shrub, some of them can be quite small, three or four feet tall. This is Henry's Garnet, it gets five to six feet tall as you can see, wonderful fall color, deep garnet and has a lovely fragrant white flower in midsummer. I might also point out that next to it is the Rose, Bay of Dublin, and the rose hips on that are also an interesting winter feature.

We've talked about this tree in another segment of GardenClips but right now it's in its glory for winter garden interest. You can see what they call exfoliating bark here. The different colors, you get this nice cinnamon colored here and the tans and the light grays. This is a fabulous winter interest, the exfoliating bark and color on certain species of trees are very subtle during the spring and summer but in the winter time when not much else is going on in the in the landscape this is drawn out. This is a beautiful Stewartia pseudocamelia.

Another great plant for fall color is just about any variety of Japanese Maple. the contrast of the Japanese maple leaves against the green bamboo is a great plant combination.