More Winter Interest Plants

October 28, 2025

The Garden House (Devon, England)

The destinations are beginning to blur but looking at the tour guide booklet, I see that we are now in Plymouth. Today, we visited two gardens designed by Keith Wiley. The first is The Garden House , where Wiley worked as Head Gardener for 25 years (from 1978-2003). The 10-acre estate was purchased in the 1940s by former Eton schoolmaster Lionel Fortescue and his wife Katherine. It was formerly home to the vicars of Buckland Monachronum. The Fortescue's renovated the gardens and ran a market garden business and raised cattle. The remains of some of the original buildings in the vicarage still stand in the garden and serve as a romantic backdrop in the Walled Garden - I loved the way they had massed ferns together. Just stunning! Surrounding the walled garden and venturing out away from the house are more naturalistic plantings - Today, the head gardener is Nick Haworth, who was previously head gardener at Greenway , which we visited earlier. Keith Wiley lef...

Beautyberry (Callicarpa)

As we hunker down and await whatever the Weather Gods send - freezing rain and snow coming later this afternoon - I'm taking stock of the remaining plants that bring some interest in the garden this time of year. I previously wrote about conifers and evergreen trees and shrubs. Here are a few more, some that are not evergreen at all, but offer drama in the form of structure and form.

Evergreen Clematis (Clematis armandii)

It got really cold last night - around 20 and today's high is only 21! I covered a few things - a eucalyptus that I planted late in the summer, the loquat tree and I brought the African Boxwood into the garage. Everything else will have to fend for itself. We were mainly concerned about our beloved hummingbirds. I brought in the feeders last night and got up earlier than usual to put them back out. Michael tried wrapping them in fabric so we will see how that works.