It’s tempting to stay indoors and huddle up in late winter, but the Winter Walk at RHS Garden Harlow Carr is calling.
Along with lungfulls of fresh North Yorkshire air, the Winter Walk’s vibrant colours, scents and hints of emerging new life will have your spirits and wellbeing revived in no time. With their leaves now gone, the dogwoods and willows get their moments of glory proudly displaying bare stems in colours from red to yellow and through to lime green. This allows you to see through their sculptural shapes to the contrasting, solid yew hedges behind which act as a perfect foil and the rustling disc-like seed heads of silver almost translucent annual honesty (Lunaria annua).
White stemmed birch trees turn up the visual volume with their dazzling white trunks and its worth taking a moment or two to stop and appreciate the classy hellebores that carpet the border edges and the softly rounded heathers with warm pink, pale pink and white flowers loved by early foraging bees.
Scents are an added bonus, suspended in the cool air on a still day, emanating from the shrubs that bravely display their flowers at this time of year. Rich and highly fragrant pink and white daphne can’t be missed along with the heavily scented flowers of Viburnum bodnantense ‘Charles Lamont’. The sweet, often spicy smell of spidery witch hazel flowers can often be detected from afar as can those from the powerfully perfumed winter box (sarcococca).
The Winter Walk, at more than 300m long, is a masterclass in planting for winter interest proving that gardens can be bright and lively all year round. It’s abundant mix of shrubs, perennials, trees and evergreens have been carefully and expertly chosen to provide a picture that brightens up a gloomy day and changes with winter’s frost, ice and snow. As the month progresses the uplifting sights of early snowdrops, Iris reticulata and aconites add another dimension to this seasonal scene.
Tempting you beyond the Winter Walk there is plenty more to see within Harlow Carr’s 58 acres. As you enter the garden, look out for the Heather Beds, a wonderful bold tapestry of colour that really shines in January and February. Down in the Arboretum around 200 bamboos in the Bamboo Glade rustle, their sounds amplified by the lack of leaf cover on the surrounding deciduous trees. Here too, stately collections of dark and light stemmed Betula can be fully appreciated in the winter light. Early flowering rhododendrons bring cheer to the new year in the Woodland.
The Alpine House is the perfect place to be inspired by some of horticulture’s smallest plants – and enjoy some welcome shelter if the weather turns. In its raised beds the January display includes little beauties like saxifrage, hepatica and crocus appreciated all the more for being plunged in pots at eye-level.
And although it may be quiet in the Kitchen Garden it’s the perfect time to admire the branching forms of the fan-trained fruit trees and willow arches which in the summer provide vital support for climbing veg like gourds.
RHS Garden Harlow Carr. Crag Lane, Beckwithshaw, Harrogate, North Yorkshire HG3 1QB
www.rhs.org.uk/harlowcarr