For Memphian Zoe Nadel, the best time to be in the garden is not early spring when the azaleas and dogwoods fill it with color. Nor is it June when her hydrangeas dot the woodland with their blue mopheads.

Her favorite time is during the winter months when details that are lost in the lush foliage reveal themselves in compelling ways.

She said: In winter the quieter things takeover. It is esthetically pure.

Nadel, an artist who draws inspiration from her garden, notices how the sparkling white winter sunlight throws black shadows on the paths and ground covers.

Her eyes discern nuances of green in the yellowish shades of the moss to the burgundy-green of the azaleas leaves, which take on a coppery hue when the sun hits them in a certain way.

She said: I like the colors in winter. The sky is cold blue. There are greens in the plants, browns in the mulch and gray in the barks.

Vibrant colors that may be taken granted in the warm months are beheld with awe in the winter. When a carpet of shiny green mondo grass reveals berries as blue as lapis lazuli beads, the delight is magnified.

The mondo grass is her Emerald City, she said. Her husband, Dr. Alan Nadel, weeds and grooms the mondo grass and other parts of the garden with a physician’s precision.

Sometimes when she is having difficulty choosing colors for a painting, she will go to the garden for inspiration. Bits of bark, lichens, fallen leaves, mosses and other evergreens lead her to artful solutions.

A stroll through the garden on a crisp, cold day is an invigorating prelude to the hours she will spend cloistered in a light-filled studio on the second floor of her home.

Although the garden is still a shady place, several important trees have been felled by lightning strikes and storms. Two tall oaks, named Grandfather and Grandmother by Nadel, stood side-by-side for decades before and after their home was built.

Although they are no longer dominant elements, Nadel kept their sizable stumps as reminders of their grandeur.
One was sawed into a chair that became a favorite place for her son Craig, now a music professional in Austin, Tex., to play his guitar.

She said: It was a hard lesson for me when they came down. But I have learned we are only caretakers. We can not control everything that happens in our gardens.

She sees artristy in a small stump, culled from a tree trimming project, whose interior pulp decayed leaving a labyrinth of swirling papery parts.

When a small cherry tree was struck dead by lightning, she had Mississippi chain-saw artist Bo Hancock create a figure of Mother Earth from it. As it weathers, some visitors think it looks like The Scream, a painting by Edvard Munch.

Two pumpkins used a fall decoration for her front porch get moved to the back where the warm glow of their orange shells contrasts with cool greens of various ground covers.

Accessories are a stronger presence in the winter, Nadel contends.

Some living things, such as the bare branches of a Japanese maple, look more like sculptures than plants when the leaves are off.

This winter she gave nature assistance by having some overgrown junipers along her front driveway pruned in a Japanese fashion. Opening up the center of the plant created more of the light and shadow interplay she likes.

She artfully placed a weathered bare branch near some stones in front of the junipers and calls it a sticks-and-stones sculpture. It reminds her of the Southwest, a place she loves.

I see beauty in things that other people perceive as waste, Nadel said.

Winter is a great time to evaluate the design of your garden and make decisions about changes, said Diane Reed, manager of horticulture at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis.

Reed said: It is a revealing time of year, a time when we appreciate the role evergreens play in the landscape.
Without leaves to soften the vertical and horizontal lines of trees and shrubs or flowers to distract the eyes, gardeners can really see the bare bones of their spaces.

Patterns created by brick or stone paths become prominent importance.

It is easier to see if focal points in the form of accessories or specimen plants do or don’t work and to notices places that need them.

No one expects lots of blooms in the winter, but some plants produce noticeable flowers such as mahonia, fragrant honeysuckle, osmanthus, witch hazel, sweet box, Florida anise and winter-hardy camellias.

A woodland garden is at its brightest in the winter when leaves are off the trees, said Tom Pellett, a garden designer who planned the Nadel garden more than a decade ago.

Pellett depends on several plants to brighten winter landscapes. He almost always interplants hosta beds with Italian arums that send up arrow-shade variegated leaves in the winter. Perennials with evergreen foliage are also useful such as the silver-mottled leaves of wild Chinese ginger (Asarum splendens), pine-scented rosemary leaves (some varieties bloom in the winter) and Nippon lily, which has strappy evergreen foliage as well as flowers and bright clusters of red-orange berries in other seasons.

He often plants nandinas for their red berries and installs trees and shrubs with interesting bark textures. He also likes the sculptural quality of oriental magnolias, dogwoods, viburnums and other flowering trees and shrubs when buds are swelling on their bare branches.

Pellett said: In the winter we are not so busy so we can really look at our gardens. We have four great seasons so we need to design for all of them

For Nadel a winter garden is almost magical:

It is like the enchanted forests in the fairy tales I loved reading as a child. It is a place where bare trunks, branches and wisps of leftover flowers become personified.