Elsa Pooley shares tips for a colourful winter garden
Elsa Pooley shares some useful tips for designing a beautiful winter garden on the coast.
Despite the arrival of the winter chill, the South Coast’s temperate climate and sunny skies allow for vibrantly colourful gardens throughout the season.
Well-known South African landscaper, Elsa Pooley, who assisted in creating the stunning indigenous gardens at Renishaw Hills, has shared some useful tips for designing a beautiful winter garden on the coast.
“The autumn and winter months are wonderfully colourful on the coast. The air is filled with butterflies and other insects, with the seed-eating birds make the most of the seeding grasses,” explained Pooley.
“Your winter garden can actually be more colourful than the summer garden, it’s just a matter of a knowing what to plant,” she added.
1. Use water wise succulent plants which thrive on the coast. For the months of May to August, aloes become a brilliant splash of colour.
Reliable succulents to try include crassulas, cotyledons, kalanchoes and kleinia fulgens.
2. Planting nectar-rich flowers will provide food for birds and many insects including a range of bee species.
At Renishaw Hills, Pooley and her team planted a large range of other succulent plants among the aloes as a way to provide colour and food for birds and insects.
As the cool dry weather moves in, the leaves of many succulents also change to deeper pink and red.
According to Pooley, excellent winter flowering shrubs that provide colourful shrubbery and also attract birds, butterflies and other insects include barleria species (bush violets), hypoestes aristata (ribbon bush) and crassula ovata (pink joy).
3. A variety of local trees and shrubs flower in the late summer and autumn, carrying fruit into winter.
These fruits provide food for a wide range of birds and insects.
The main winter flowering trees are the coral trees, with scarlet flowers attracting even non-nectar eating birds.
The nectar also attracts insects which, in turn, attract insectivorous birds.
Pooley said that reliable shrubs which flower almost throughout the year include tecomaria capensis (cape honeysuckle), chrysanthemoides monilifera (bush tick berry) and plumbago auriculata.
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