The Allure of the Dormant Season
It’s easy to love a garden in spring. The emerging growth and bursting buds are like walking into a fully stocked pastry shop—the treats are everywhere. It takes a different approach to appreciate a place’s charms in dormancy.
On a cold winter day, finding touches of beauty is more like a scavenger hunt. Each treat imparts a special joy borne of scarcity, and the experience can transform how you see a landscape.
What treasures await us in a dormant landscape? Fluffy seedheads, intricate flower structures, and tiny packets filled with potential. Leaf, stem, and floral architecture silhouetted against a pale blue sky. The sun, low in the horizon, infusing downy plumes with golden light. What seems spent or dead is nature cycling itself back into life. Finding this beauty in a dormant landscape often takes using more than one’s eyes. The ears have a role as well, following the wind as it rustles grasses and sets seedpods chattering. Or hearing the foraging of birds amongst the fallen leaves.
More importantly, the brain is activated. We know the plants are offering food, shelter, nesting material, and protection to the creatures around us. Birds flock to the abundant seedheads of ironweed, asters, and goldenrod. Dry blades of grasses are formed into nests and stuffed into burrows and cavities for overwintering. The stems left standing from last winter shelter bees that will emerge in spring. They will immediately create nests in the current winter’s stems to house the next generation. The landscape teems with life and potential that we cannot see directly, but we know it’s there.
The dormant landscape also touches us at a level below awareness. It lends calm and promotes reflection. We are part of nature and its cycles, which include times of growth, dormancy, and eventually death. Walking the winter landscape can help us reconnect and develop a deep and abiding appreciation for nature’s beauty at every stage.
So, let’s go outside and look for those winter treasures while the season is with us. The seedhead or berry that sustains wildlife. The tiny tunnel in stem stubble that shelters a native bee. The complex structure left when a composite flower releases its seeds. When we discover the wonders it offers, it’s easy to love a garden in winter.
Sharing Winter with Wildlife
If you’d like to learn more about providing overwintering and nesting habitat for native bees and other beneficial insects, this Xerces Society’s publication is a big help.
Nesting & Overwintering Habitat
They’ve also got a great graphic that explains when and how to cut back stems in your garden to best support stem-nesting bees. It may not work the way you think it does!
How to Create Habitat for Stem-Nesting bees.pdf
For a look at provisioning birds, start with our post on Bird-Friendly Plants for Winter Forage.
Opening image: Ageratina altissima (white snakeroot).
All images © Izel Native Plants
Shannon Currey is a horticultural educator with Izel Native Plants. She’s worked in the nursery trade since 2006, and has established herself as an expert on graminoids, including native grasses and sedges. She serves on the North Carolina Plant Conservation Program Scientific Committee and the board of the Perennial Plant Association. In 2022 she joined our team to expand our outreach efforts. Shannon lives in Durham, North Carolina and loves exploring the incredible plant diversity around her.
