Winter asks us to see a garden differently. Spring offers opportunity, with all of nature poised to bloom. Summer, wanton and luxuriant, is easy to love, while autumn provides a familiar embrace tinged with nostalgia or relief, depending on your mood. But winter is an altogether different experience. Subtle, reduced, defined, restrained, it is careful with its charms, bestowing them upon those who notice the slightest nuance of light, scent, colour and form.
RHS Hyde Hall, just outside Chelmsford in Essex, may be one of the Society’s warmest gardens in summer, but in winter it receives the full force of the easterly winds blowing in from continental Europe. Without the ameliorating aspects of the Gulf Stream enjoyed in
