By Jimmy Williams

Those glorious annual and perennial beds and borders that will be your pride and joy between now and frost can, after that, descend from their heavenly condition of summer to the depths of Sheol for the duration of winter.

Nobody expects—not in our zone anyway—an endless paradise of summer. At the same time, we don't want to gaze on dereliction for the majority of the year either. Even long-blooming flowering plants are dormant for the greater part of the year.

What can we do to prop up some kind of interest in those areas, so that we can prevent finding ourselves pining for the first snow of winter to mercifully cover it all up?

Shrubs, and even small trees, provide some structure during winter, even though deciduous ones are bereft of leaves. A properly pruned dwarf cutleaf Japanese maple, for instance, offers marvelous trunk and branch arrangement that will hold your interest all winter.

Another example, this time evergreen, is a sheared boxwood, holly or the like that will go largely unnoticed when surrounded by the verdancy of summer. As soon as other leaves fall, however, the glossy evergreen ones will lunge to the fore and prevent winter boredom from becoming worse than it could be.

During all of last year, I photographed our garden several times a month for a slide presentation planned for this spring. I was astonished when previewing the slides to see how just a couple of pyramidal boxwoods in our largest mixed border saved the whole area from drowning completely in winter's dismal abyss.

Often a photograph will more vividly proclaim a message (either of success or failure) than viewing the scene in person. This time proclamation was of the former, and the boxwoods were more dramatic in a January shot than I had remembered them.

In the present case, the winter photo had revealed the usual expanse of bare ground where summer perennials had held forth a few months earlier. The blessing of a light snow was absent, and only a dim winter sun barely illuminated the scene. Nearby ornamental grasses, which had contributed considerable structure only a month earlier, had already been cut away for the winter.

The two boxwoods (primarily, though there were a couple of smaller shrubs nearby that also offered some redemption) stood at rapt attention, their bright green a welcome relief to all the otherwise sere effect of grays and browns.

For a less rigid picture, I could leave the boxwoods unsheared. They would then eventually billow out into a more informal look.