Winter Landscaping: Making Your Yard a Songbird’s Winter Wonderland

In a season when most of the usual landscaping elements, like flowerbeds, are unavailable, your options for landscaping can seem a little sparse. For most people, just finding a good place to hang lights and keeping the walkways shoveled is enough for the landscaping front, if only because it seems like there’s little else to do for the yard. Yet, winter offers lots of landscaping opportunities, if you’re willing to see them for what they are. Snow, for one, can be a beautiful part of your winter scenes, especially in the way it sits in your trees and shrubs, and in how it contrasts with bursts of perennial color.

But this week, I thought I’d talk about a different landscaping possibility, one that might not come readily to mind: how to incorporate birds into your landscaping scenes by providing a natural place for them to feed and take shelter.

Before we go too much further, however, I’d like to add in a disclaimer: no matter what, never introduce an invasive species into your yard. Only use native plant species in your landscaping designs; not only are these more likely to attract local songbirds to your home, but they’re exponentially less likely to damage already-delicate ecosystems.

With that out of the way, the first order of business in attracting birds is having a good feeder out for them. According to Diane Porter at Birdwatch.com, this means buying a feeder that is protected from squirrels (and other seed-stealing competitors), so try to find several good spiral or tube feeders, and offer them at varying heights above the ground. Secondly, only ever use single-seed bird feed in a given feeder. Birds tend to be picky, so they’ll scatter unwanted seed types and leave them rotting on the ground. Avoid this unsightliness by using dedicated feeders for each seed type. David Beaulieu from About.com also suggests using natural bird foods, like berries, in your landscaping. Holly is a great plant for this, as it occurs naturally in a large number of regions, and its berries are a beautiful red that contrast nicely with the snow.

Finally, don’t forget your conifers! A well-placed pine tree can make a yard festive all year-round, and provides valuable shelter for birds in the winter.

Hopefully, these tips will revitalize your landscaping efforts during the cold months, and help you build a winter wonderland worthy of any season’s greeting card!