Every winter the garden or shelter magazines have a feature on “winter gardening”.  Winter gardening generally means you design your garden so that when it’s covered in snow and everything is generally brown, curled, and dead, it still retains some interest.  This usually means incorporating things like ornamental grasses and evergreens such as dwarf conifers or boxwood.  Sorry, it just doesn’t do it for me.  Come on!  Give the winter its dominance, I don’t even bother trying to hang on to some garden dignity from November to March.

This is not to say I don’t like ornamental grasses and conifers, it’s just I don’t expect them to hold up the garden in the month’s where IT’S DEAD–give it up man.  I will admit however, to checking out hellebores in the catalogs this winter because they do bloom in the dead of winter, but figured Colorado’s brutal dry winters would certainly make things difficult for them and decided to just spend my winters doing what I always do–counting down the days until the pansies appear again in March where I will promptly buy a bunch that will get snowed and iced and half will die but I don’t care.