Bleak midwinter? Not at all! Even when pared back, your plot can become a dazzling delight

This weekend marks the winter solstice, the time of year when we in the northern hemisphere are as far away from the sun as we get.

Low light levels mean many plants want to hibernate beneath a warm blanket of soil. Trees are bare skeletons, their branches reaching like bony fingers into the gloom.

In the UK, we are resigned to the season being predominantly damp and grey. But every so often we are surprised and delighted by one of those crisp December days when the skies are the brightest of blue and the Sun, when it makes its brief appearance, casts everything in a dazzling light.

On such days it is easy to go outside and see what the midwinter garden has to offer.

Even though it lacks the cornucopia of summer, there is still plenty of variety in my own back garden.

Just outside our back door we have a Cornus ‘Midwinter Fire’, bought from National Trust property Wakehurst Place in Sussex about five years ago. It has grown to about 2m tall, even though I cut it back each spring.

This dogwood is grown for the colour of its stems after the leaves have fallen. They turn flame-like through gold to orange to red. Once it has become established after a year or two, it is easy to take cuttings to generate more plants, so that soon you will have a large clump.

Beside this we have a cherry laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) which can become a bit of a thug, so I trim ours right back every year to keep it in shape and appreciate it for its glossy green structure in winter.

In late spring it bears beautiful candles of white flowers.

In the same border, we have a Fatsia japonica or Japanese aralia, a wonderful plant for year-round interest with large fan-like leaves. When these become discoloured, I cut them off, but not until spring when the plant will be able to put out new ones easily.

In winter, it produces tiers of pale green sputnik-like flowers which look like little alien Christmas trees.

Evergreens are the mainstay of the winter garden, and we also have a Choisya ternata, or Mexican orange blossom, providing a green backdrop to look out on.

In late spring and again in early autumn, it is covered in white flowers with a distinctive fragrance that some people love, and others detest.

At the back of our garden is a bay, which has been left to grow into a tree. It needs to be kept in check, so in January, when tree surgeons come to give our garden an annual trim (this is a job for the professionals), I will ask them to shape it tightly.

We also have a slow-growing holly that has been cut over the years into a bell shape. In summer it is useful for the shade it casts beneath its branches, and in winter it is covered in bright red berries which the birds love.

Also great for visiting songbirds are rosehips. I leave these on all winter and prune them back at the end of February.

Two large ferns by the back door are starting to look brown and floppy, but I leave the old fronds on these until early spring, to provide shelter for wildlife as well as young shoots that come up underneath.

Other winter garden favourites are dried seed heads and grasses. From the seat where I write, looking out into the garden, I can see moonlike discs of honesty (Lunaria annua), as well as the silvery leaves of ghostly ornamental grass Miscanthus sinensis ‘Kleine Silberspinne’, a reminder that there is beauty even in decay