Using Harry Lauder's Walking Stick in the Winter Landscape

Hi, I’m David Epstein. This is Growing Wisdom. In my hand, I have harry lauder’s walking stick. It’s a little shrub and really the reason why you’d put this in is for winter interest. The contortion of this particular plant is wonderful, as a matter of fact, the name contorta is in the official Latin name of this plant because it is so contorted.
Now, placement is key with something like this. You want to put it somewhere when you’re looking out during the winter, you can see it and enjoy it and notice the snow falling in all the different branches. That’s what’s so great about it. Now, even though this guy is very small right now, it’s only about a foot and a half, two feet tall, we could already see some of the bark beginning to exfoliate and where I’m thinking of putting this is I had a huge tree taken down in this stomp here. And the stomp is not going to be ground, I know that. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to put this just behind this stomp. The sun will hit the plant and I’m hoping that the plant kind of grows over the stomp, sort of hides it a little bit later on. It also makes for almost a nice platform in front of this plant. You can see how beautiful the plant is, the structure of it. And right straight ahead is my kitchen window. So in the winter, I’ll be able to see this as I’m working inside, doing cooking or entertaining or any of those things. And eventually this will get to be big enough that it would really start to show and be sort of a show piece for this part of the garden during the winter months.
So harry lauder’s walking stick, a great winter interest plant. You know, all other winter interest plants are something like winterberry. We put one of those next to it. So that will give me a little bit of interest in this particular area. We’ve also got some hollies as well as some yews. So the whole area of the garden, though it’s not all winter interest plants, it’s a mix, and of course in summer this looks very different.
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