As we do every year, we’ll be taking a break between the Christmas and New Year’s holidays—our offices will be closed. From time to time during the week we’ll stop by to take care of orders and other necessary tasks but those hours will be on the casual side. If you need to speak with us, please leave a phone message because we’ll be sure to listen to it.

Go ahead and take advantage of the quiet time over the holidays to do your planning for the upcoming season—our Pre-Order screens on the web site will be open. For your convenience, orders may be placed via email or fax as well. We’ll also be sending out our usual acknowledgements and responses, only at a more relaxed holiday pace.

Winter color does exist: Ornamental Kale ‘Peacock’ among the violas.

Many feel that there is a dead zone in the color calendar between Columbus Day and Christmas; as far as commercial landscape accounts are concerned, there is no color to offer. As growers who make money selling color to the green goods industry, we can tell you this point of view is completely wrong. We are growing some pretty interesting stuff in our Winter Trial Gardens, and we think these plants can help landscapers build another season of billable color services to their clients.

To us, a plant qualifies as Great Winter Color if it offers strong colors, bold textures or both. The plant should look better and better as the season turns colder and colder—it also needs to take hard hits of frost and bounce back looking great. For bonus points, we also consider the shape of the plant. We like garden drama; therefore, we select plants that capture interest.

So, what have we found? Let’s take a tour of this year’s Winter Color Garden.

Daffodil ‘Pink Charm’

Every head turns at the sight of a pink daffodil. Yellow is entrenched in our minds when it comes to this flower so a different shade is enough to stop us in our tracks. We like a plant that grabs our attention and ‘Pink Charm’ is definitely that.

Rose Shades with faces

We have a new high-performance trailing pansy for early spring—the WonderFall™ series from Syngenta. These vigorous plants spread up to three times more than traditional pansies and are covered with big blooms throughout fall, winter, and spring. That adds up to the same amount of color coverage using one-third the amount of plants—you do the math.