Doris Page Winter Garden

Doris Page Winter Garden

Forty years ago, the Victoria Horticultural Society sponsored the establishment of the Doris Page Winter Garden. Over time, the shady slope, dominated by towering firs, has become home to all kinds of plants, from beautifully mature witch hazels (Hamamelis) and hundreds of hellebores, to a stand of prickly, red-berried butcher's broom (Ruscus) which you're more likely to see in a florist's shop than gardens these days. A few bulbs and corms have multiplied into swathes of snowdrops (Galanthus), carpets of cyclamen, an enchantment of pink fawn lilies (Erythronium revolutum). When the bulb show culminates in pools of white, blue, pink, and yellow anemones throughout the woods, I give my prayer of gratitude to those who first planted this area, and the many gardeners and volunteers that have maintained it since, for their vision of a garden which holds space for all these ephemeral joys.

Over the years, I have visited a number of other winter gardens, big and small. Very often they're conceived of as gimmicky bedding schemes that look as shockingly silly in summer as they do in winter. In sharp contrast, our winter garden is in a cottagey, woodland style, inspired by Doris Page. It's cozy, quiet, and rewards the visitor who prefers to wander. It seems fitting that the white-stemmed bramble (Rubus cockburnianus), practically mandatory in showy winter gardens, refuses to grow more than one stem a year in ours,

whereas Garrya elliptica, a native plant to the Pacific Northwest that very  

rarely gets pride of place, is thriving and in full flower right now. Sure, the flowers are dangling grey 'silk tassels' that you might not even recognize as flowers, yet as the winter weeks go by they have become fringed yellow and blush pink bells, set off by glossy, deep green foliage. Ours was planted in 2019, so it is still relatively small, but I have seen towering ones over 10 ft that evoked pure wonder, the tassels shimmying in a frigid February wind. When the garden turns 50, someone will be writing an ode to it, mark my words.

My odes today are to the old cornelian cherries (Cornus mas) that arch over our paths, filling the February sky with starry yellow flowers.

On a sunny day in January, we watched a bumble bee busily gathering pollen from one of our many winter honeysuckles (Lonicera fragrantissima);

no one would describe them a handsome shrub in summer, but there's none with a sweeter scent now. And even while the  growing conditions on our steeply sloped beds get more difficult and dry each year, the white- and red-berried Skimmia continue to thrive, their shiny green leaves lift the winter gloom.

While most of the HCP gardens are at rest, the winter garden is changing week on week. You've already missed the best of the witch hazel flowers this year, I'm afraid, but the daphnes are only just beginning. Choose to visit on a sunny day and all the bulbs will open their flowers to meet you.

Amy Sanderson

HCP Doris Page Winter Garden volunteer