A garden that looks good in August is easy. A garden that earns its keep in February - after four feet of snow, six weeks of gray, and a nor'easter that blows out your power for two days - takes a different kind of design.
Most of the landscape work I see in Maine is designed for the growing season. That makes sense - it's the season we're outside in, the season we photograph, the season we show friends when they visit. But here on Mount Desert Island we get five months where the ground is either frozen, covered, or both. The question I ask every client during our first site walk is the same one I ask myself: what is this garden doing in January?
The bones have to stand alone
In summer, the perennials and grasses and annuals are doing most of the visual work. They're loud, they're layered, they're carrying the eye from spot to spot. In winter, all of that collapses into the ground. What's left is what I call the bones of the garden - the stonework, the trees, the major evergreens, and the architectural seed heads that survived the killing frost.
If the bones aren't composed, a Maine garden in January looks like an abandoned lot. If they are, it looks like a sculpture.
This is the part we spend the longest on in design - longer than the perennial schedule, longer than the hardscape material selection. The bones include:
- Major evergreens: white pine, hemlock, balsam, and the spruces. Not as foundation plants but as sited statements.
- Deciduous trees with standout winter structure: paperbark maple, river birch, shadblow, and any of the crabapples whose fruits persist into February.
- Hardscape geometry: walls, stairs, terraces, and edges that hold their line under snow cover.
- Seed heads we deliberately leave standing: echinacea, baptisia, rudbeckia, the grasses. They catch snow in ways that change the whole composition.
A garden that earns its keep in February takes a different kind of design.
Light in the off-season
Maine winter light is low and raking. The sun is above the horizon for eight hours and hits a garden at a sharper angle than any other time of year. Things that read as visual mush in July - a row of staggered boulder heights, the silhouette of a lone oak, the shadow cast by a dry-laid wall - suddenly become the whole point.
One of our rules: every major winter sightline from inside the house should land on something structural. Not necessarily large - a single sculpted rock the size of a chair, placed right, can carry the entire view on a December morning.
Snow is a design material
This one took me years to internalize. Snow isn't an interruption of the garden - in a coastal Maine winter it's the garden. Wind patterns mean snow drifts unevenly. Certain plants catch it. Certain walls hold it. Certain terraces stay bare while the lawn beside them holds three feet.
Once you start designing for this, small moves matter. A two-foot berm on the windward side of a sitting area creates a sheltered pocket that stays usable into late December. A row of spruce, tightly spaced, acts as a snow fence and leaves a clean terrace on the leeward side. These decisions aren't visible in summer renderings - but they're the difference between a garden you walk past in January and a garden you walk through.
A short checklist
If you're thinking about your own property, here's the short version of what we watch for:
- What does the property look like on February 15 from the main indoor rooms?
- Which plants hold their form through snow load? Which ones get mashed?
- Where does the wind come from in December, and what is the property doing about it?
- What's the first thing visible when the snow melts in March? Make sure it's worth looking at.
Design for all twelve months. Or at least be honest with yourself about which five you're designing for and what the other seven are going to look like.