My garden as winter kicks in

This year was the year that I finally began to take our garden seriously. We were lucky enough to have it redesigned in May, and so we spent the summer visiting garden centres and nurturing our new plants with the aim of filling the garden with colour. Here's what it looked like in the summer:

The bed at the front with the canna lilies was one of my favourite parts of the garden. They grew and grew, and more and more flower heads just kept coming. They were so beautiful! But they began to fade, and after the first couple of frosts they were looking very sad.

I took advice from various sources and decided that I would risk leaving them out over the winter. I cut them right down, and then tucked them up in some horticultural fleece. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they survive for another display next year!

Elsewhere I do still have some colour - my lovely purple salvias are still flowering! I'm really hoping that they last the winter as they did incredibly well, they grew from one stem to nearly filling the large borders. I'm definitely going to buy some more next year for the empty patches along our back fence. 

Our garden designer gave us some tips for planting, and one was to include evergreen plants and shrubs in a range of different shades so that the garden will still look colourful in the winter. These purple Heuchera are a gorgeous colour, and at the moment they contrast really well with the fallen leaves. The lighter green shrub is Choisya Sundance and it has grown up really fast. I love the different colours on this section of the border.

I'm still spending quite a lot of time in the garden picking up the fallen leaves, or at least whenever I can get out between the rain showers. We no longer have a front hedge which means that they get caught up among the plants and I don't like having them on the paths or lying on the lawn.

Over the winter I'm going to be popping out from time to time to keep things tidy, and also reading up on pruning techniques for when all these plants get bigger. I'm also going to be buying seeds ready to plant indoors in early spring. 

I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens to the garden next spring, I'm hoping that it will all start to fill out a bit and look less sparse!