Gardening advice: bring outdoor spaces to life with cold weather-loving climbers and flowering shrubs

Even in winter, you can transform walls and fences with foliage and flowers, making the whole garden come to life as well as fudging the boundary lines and making a welcome refuge for wildlife.

It takes a few seasons for climbers to camouflage fencing, so if fence panels are mismatched, this is a good moment to unify them — as well as trellis — with a dark colour that will visually knock them back and make the perfect, barely there backdrop.

Garden stains tend to fade, so use two coats of a more opaque paint such as Farrow & Ball’s Exterior Eggshell in Railings, a soft-black shade of deep charcoal. Meanwhile jaded brick walls, like York stone, can be transformed beyond belief with just a single-session power wash.

Climbers need to cling, which is sound reason to give them a support system before you plant rather than trying to prop them as they grow, which never works.

Galvanised steel wires, threaded through vine eyes and kept taut with straining bolts, are the professionals’ underpinnings of choice on to which clematis can twine, vines can cling and climbing roses can be tied, their stems coaxed into the horizontal so they break bud along the length.

THINK SEASONALLY

With their ability to pump out a profusion of soup-plate flowers over weeks on end, Clematis are an obvious choice, but think seasonally before you rush out to buy half a dozen varieties that look sensational in summer but are reduced to withered stems in winter.

At this time of year, late-flowering Clematis tangutica’s flashy seedheads are putting on a shimmering, silken show and in some London gardens, the striking lemon-peel lantern flowers are still apparent.

If you look out on to a bare wall in winter, Clematis cirrhosa var balearica will clothe it fast and furiously. Its pretty, ferny leaves take on bronze tones in winter and, given a sunny spot, this Mediterranean native will produce a seemingly endless supply of plum-speckled, cream cupped flowers right through till spring.

On a patio wall, Clematis armandii, which looks more like an exotic conservatory plant than a garden climber, will spread its large, glossy oval leaves and, in a sheltered London garden, the heavenly scented, waxy white flower clusters can appear as early as January.

See London’s number one climbing plant, Trachelospermum jasminoides, in full floral action in summer, the jasmine-scented white blossom all but concealing the neat, glossy leaves, and you will be seduced.

But at this time of year, the foliage takes on attractive burnished tints, making it a great all-rounder. For full-on flower power, site this climber in the sunshine.

Why would you settle for ivy when you can have this evergreen beauty shimmying all over your walls and fences? Because dainty ivy Hedera helix Glacier, with white-edged, silvery-grey wavy foliage, is a confirmed shade-lover, and will bring light and life into the gloomiest corner of your garden.

STUNNING SHRUBS

To instantly conceal fences and walls, think shrubs — and they need not be evergreen to create an impact. A red-brick house wall is the perfect place to display the woody, horizontal framework of a chaenomeles, especially if it’s variety Crimson and Gold, which, even in part shade, produces fire engine-red flowers that stud the bare twigs in the earliest months of the year before the deep green leaves appear. Once the framework is developed, the effect of those vibrant red flowers on bare twigs set against a brick wall is simply stunning.

Another variety of Japanese quince, Chaenomeles speciosa Nivalis, has pure white cupped flowers that would look the height of luxury highlighted against a black fence, like pearls against velvet.

Think of photinia as a workhorse. Easy-growing, evergreen and with a conveniently upright growth, it does a grand job of covering a wall with handsome, russet-tinted leaves and makes a superb leafy foil for flowering perennials in the foreground. This is the foliage shrub for front-of-house. Variety Red Robin has particularly bright new scarlet growth and can scale 15ft, but is eminently clippable.

For visual kicks through the coldest months of the year, evergreen Garrya elliptica James Roof, aka the silk-tassel bush, is unbeatable. Imagine pale, silvery catkins the length of your hand, cascading all the way down a wall. In frost, they look even more beautiful. For the rest of the year, garrya earns a well-deserved rest as foliage back-up for showier perennials.

Classy and expensive, Daphne bholua Jacqueline Postill holds the unchallenged title of queen of flowering shrubs, especially as her divine pink flowers, heavily perfumed, appear as early as January. She’s a gorgeous creature, growing obligingly tall and slim, so is ideally suited for the shelter of a warm house wall where her intoxicating fragrance will remind you that spring is not so very far away.