RHS Garden Rosemoor’s newly expanded Winter Garden is a major new landscape designed by award-winning garden designer Jo Thompson. The project marks one of the most significant developments at Rosemoor in recent years, redefining this part of the garden as a destination for winter interest, structure and naturalistic planting design.

Planting is both naturalistic and romantic, with a focus on texture, silhouette and subtle winter colour. Mature trees, including birch, Japanese maples, Catalpa and the rare Fraxinus profunda, provide instant height and atmosphere. Drifts of grasses and herbaceous perennials weave between them, their soft movement animated by low winter light. Dogwoods, willows, daphnes and Hydrangea paniculata offer structure, scent and seasonal highlights, while the birch glade forms a quiet tapestry of whites, bronzes and pinks from cultivars such as Betula ermanii ‘Daleside’ and Betula utilis subsp. albosinensis ‘China Rose’ and ‘Nepalese Orange’.

Jo Thompson’s design brings renewed structure and flow to the Winter Garden, creating a landscape that reveals itself gradually as you move through it. Vistas are opened, clearings framed and paths positioned to capture the low winter sun, illuminating bark, stems and frosted seedheads at key moments.

Sustainability is embedded throughout the scheme. Approximately 170 tonnes of concrete from former garden features were excavated, crushed on site and reused as hardcore within the new design. The expanded planting palette: 96 trees, 234 grasses, 260 shrubs, 1,120 herbaceous plants and 1,612 bulbs has been composed for long-term resilience, ecological value and year-round interest.

The Winter Garden offers a sequence of atmospheric spaces where structure, bark and silhouettes take centre stage. As frost, low sun and winter shadow shift across the planting, visitors will experience the quiet drama and beauty that define Jo Thompson’s approach to winter landscape design.

Photography by: Jason Ingram, Guy Harrop and Mark Bolton.