If January were a person, it would be one of those cold, hard, and bitter souls with a perpetually crabby demeanor and a face frozen into a permanent scowl. Even the occasional sunny displays of warmth seem forced and suspicious, and it is generally agreed that the sooner one is rid of such an individual, the better.
I do not like January. The harsh, biting cold and ungodly early sunsets keep me inside far more than I would like, and most of my plants are bare and brown, if not entirely vanished beneath the soggy ground.
In selecting plants for my garden, I’ve made it a point to go heavy on the evergreens, and to make sure they are planted in view of the windows that I often look out of, or near the paths that I walk on my infrequent forays across the permafrost.
Whenever I visit other gardens in January (which, admittedly, is not all that often) I take note of what looks attractive during this most dismal of all months. Anything worth going outside to see in January is deserving of a place in my garden.
For the rest of the month, then, I invite you to join me on a tour of my January garden. I’ll try to do a post every day highlighting one plant that brings joy, life, and greenery to the deadest month of the year. In return, I’ll ask you to post a comment telling about one of your favorite January plants. (Tell if it likes sun or shade, moist or dry sites, and anything else readers ought to know if they are thinking of adding your plant to their winter garden.
Today’s plant is Italian Arum. I discovered this in my mother’s garden several years ago, and she gave me several to bring back to Greensboro. She told me that “Arums come up as the Hostas go down” and vice versa, and that is a pretty good description of their life cycle. (Some people, in fact, refer to them as “Winter Hostas.”)

They strike me as shade plants because of their wide leaves, and aesthetically seem most at home in a woodland garden–mine are in the front shade garden beneath the dogwoods, with azaleas and hellebores for companions. There is not a lot of winter shade there, though, so they can take some sun, but they seem to do better if they aren’t stuck out in the full sun and wind. The soil there is damp, heavy clay, and they do fine in it.
They have these little corms at the roots, sort of like wild onions, and they multiply, but definitely will not take over a space. In May, just before they go dormant, these really odd flowers appear.
According to the people who know, arums are best divided in the summer when they are dormant. The problem, though, is I can’t find them in the summer, so I dig them up and move them on sunny days in winter (like today) and hope for the best. (In the fall of 2008, I rearranged my shade garden and moved the little gumpo azaleas closer together because I thought they would be more visually appealing to a person walking up the path to the front door. I forgot about the arums, which weren’t up yet, and a few weeks later noticed them coming up right in the middle of the azaleas. I made a note to do something about that the following summer, but we got a little sidetracked by a very unexpected discovery, and I am only now getting around to moving them.