Although Gardening Online Magazine is all about gardening, you can’t really have a garden without the blooms. For this reason, we are happy to take a few minutes each month to look at various blooms and plants that you can add to your garden. Since we are starting in January, it is only appropriate that we should start with a plant that will bring you color through the winter months.
This week, the plant that we are going to look at is Witch Hazel.
In the world of gardening, there are actually only a handful of plants that bloom during the winter months. Sure, you can find plants that retain their color or even offer a new color to the gardening landscape but despite that burst of green, there really isn’t much else happening. The plants are dormant and all you can see is a touch of green poking out from under snow-swept boughs.
Witch Hazel is one of the few plants that actually produce bloom in the winter. In fact, it is so common to see the long strap-like blooms in winter that the plant is often called “Winterbloom” instead of Witch Hazel.
Witch Hazel itself, can be found in many different areas and there are actually two species in North America. It can thrive in both zones 3 and 4 and does well in partial shade to full sun. The best soil for Witch Hazel is soil that has a higher acidic level and is moist. Witch Hazel really is a plant of all seasons and its gray to gray-brown bark can be covered in reddish-brown new leaves, dark green spring and summer leaves, and yellow leaves in the fall. Generally, Witch Hazel blooms in the late fall but it has been known to bloom right into late winter.
The blooms themselves have a spicy fragrance and they can be found in a number of colors including yellow; from pale to dark, red, and orange. The flowers are spider-like in appearance and have shaft-like petals.
Witch Hazel can be a wonderful addition to any winter garden and it can be used for herbal remedies, although I would never recommend using the plant as a remedy unless you are properly trained in using it.
And there is our first winter bloom. Doesn’t it add just a hint of color to the otherwise white world out there?
Sirena Van Schaik