Winter Interest

There's been a discussion over on Garden Rant about winter interest.  Commenters have divided into two camps, the North and South.  Fortunately we're all too civilized to start another Civil War.  So I thought I would show some of you Southern Gardeners how winter interest is done up here in New England.

I'm interested in how much snow it takes before a roof collapses.

I'm interested in whether the top of the snow will become hard and my dogs will discover that they can jump over the fence.

I'm interested in whether my garage rosemary will survive to spring (Reminder:  it's time to water that plant!).

I'm interested if anyone will hit me while I'm backing blindly out of our driveway since I can't see around the snow banks on either side of the drive.  I find the same interest at a lot of intersections.

More conventionally here are some ornamental grasses.  You can see that I didn't cut them back in the fall.

And I didn't cut back my perennials.  The Liatris 'Kobold' is still standing strong.

I planted several nice evergreen shrubs near the foundation for winter interest.  I'm sure youc an figure out what they are without me labeling them!

On a not-as-snarky note here are some shrub dogwoods (Cornus hessyii 'Garden Glow').  They do actually stick up from the snow and look nice against all the white when I look out the kitchen windows to the bird feeders.

Please be kind to us poor Northern Gardeners and don't remind us that is some places Winter Interest means looking at the hardscaping and evergreens in the garden!