This is the time many of us wish we’d planted poppies or pansies in autumn so our garden would be a blaze of colour now.
But even if you haven’t there’s still time to grab some flowery sparkle for the grey of winter.
The simplest way to add a touch of brilliant colour is one small pot of cyclamen for your desk or dining table.
They do best in a warm spot that’s cool at night, but not too near a very hot window. Care for it and it’ll reward with the bright pink (or red, purple, white or bicoloured and even frilled) blooms all the way till summer — and hopefully bloom again for you next winter too.
Much more lavish is one big elegant indoor plant. The choice will depend on your budget and your garden centre, or even a nearby upmarket florist, as they all have their specialties.
My favourites are multi-coloured ornamental bananas or a giant red-leafed begonia or one of those orchids that looks like it came straight from a Paris catwalk, all slim and ‘don’t touch me’ perfect.
Everything large and stunning will be expensive but, on the other hand, a well-loved indoor plant is an excellent investment.
Work out how much they cost in café lattes or chocolate biscuits (an orchid, for example, will be about 20 take-away coffees and four fat gluggy take-away muffins) and know that you’ve not only done well by your waistline, but given yourself pleasure for years to come.
Winter is the time to wander through the outdoor furniture section and, even more importantly, sit on the chairs at the table for at least twenty minutes before you decide to buy.
Too many outdoor chairs look good but leave you with backache. They end up as patio ornaments, useful only for spider’s nests, until you guiltily get rid of them years later.
If you are embarrassed about sitting on them in the showroom for twenty minutes, pretend to be taking an urgent phone call or having an argument with recalcitrant teenagers.
The cheapest and best investment of all though just needs either a spade or a rake — a spade to dig a new vegie garden or a rake to rake up yours and the neighbours’ autumn leaves and pile them with some garden prunings to make an above-ground garden bed.
By spring the grass below should be dead. You can rake it all away again, plant your seedlings in bare earth, then when they are finger high and won’t rot in the heat and moisture from the mulch, rake the now semi-decayed leaves back to keep the weeds down.
And then there are the winter daydreams — the ones I’ve been having for years and probably will never quite get around to.
A garden fountain out the front, a small recycling water feature on a garden wall; a tiny courtyard that will trap the winter sun and by summer be covered with a pergola of grapes, dripping down for you to pluck (birds never eat the grapes and leave splotchy droppings in a garden daydream).
There is the plastic-covered poly-tunnel that will give us tomatoes by Christmas; the vanilla orchid twining up a driftwood prop in the sunny corner of the living room; the bonsai forest along the sunny kitchen window sill.
Or, best of all, the teenager who says, ‘Hey, Mum, I’m really into gardening now. Can I have 100 asparagus plants for my birthday? And by the way, where are the secateurs?”
Ah, well. We can dream. And winter is the best time of all for dreaming of what your garden can become this summer.
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