What colours do you associate with winter? The obvious answers are white, for the occasional dusting of snow; or grey, for those short, rainy days. But winter is full of bright delights. If we look closely at nature, there are incredible colours to be found, even on the most overcast days.

Dependably green

Whilst many of the wild trees around us are deciduous and have lost their leaves, there are some that stay green all year long. The UK has five native species of evergreen tree, growing wild but also often planted in parks and gardens.

Scots pine, with its slender needles and familiar pinecones, grows native in Scotland and has been planted across the UK for timber. Yew often grows in churchyards and can live for thousands of years. Holly’s dark green leaves and red berries have made it a popular Christmas decoration. Box is perhaps best known for garden topiary, but also grows wild on hillsides in southern England. Finally, there’s juniper, one of the first trees to colonise the UK after the last Ice Age, now used to flavour gin.

Whether you’re exploring a woodland, heathland, churchyard, park or perhaps even a garden, there are likely to be evergreen trees adding a touch of colour to the landscape.

Winging it

Birds are often the most obvious animals in winter. They’re visiting feeders in our gardens, flocking on lakes and plucking berries from bushes. Many of them bring a welcome splash of colour. The robin is a familiar favourite; its blazing ‘red breast’ (more of an orange, really) often brightens up a park or garden on an otherwise dull day. The blue tit is even more colourful, pairing a sun-bright yellow belly with a crown, tail and wings as blue as any sea. They’re such a common sight, it can be easy to forget how dazzling they are. 

For most of us, siskins aren’t quite such a common sight – but they are well worth seeking out. These dainty finches travel in flocks, moving restlessly from tree to tree. They favour pine trees, birches and alders, but will also visit birdfeeders, particularly in winter. Females have a subtle beauty, but males are gloriously garish, a burst of bright yellow and green amongst the bare branches.

Some of the most spectacular colours are found on the dabbling ducks, but most of the time they keep them hidden. They have a patch of feathers on their wing known as a speculum. It’s generally covered whilst they’re swimming or snoozing, their true beauty revealed only when they spread their wings. 

The speculum is different in each species, but is often bright and shimmeringly iridescent. Perhaps the best examples belong to the teal and the humble mallard. Teals have a patch of the most gorgeous green, a slither of which can be seen on swimming females. Mallards have a brilliant blue that rivals the shine of the male’s bottle-green head.

Tiny works of art

Some winter colours only reveal themselves with a closer look. Fungi are often hidden amongst the leaf litter, or dwarfed by the trees on which they grow. Spend a little time searching for stumps and fallen branches and you’ll be rewarded with some fabulously colourful finds. 

For many fungi, their name gives away their colourful nature. The scarlet elfcup is a vibrant red bowl, growing in clusters on decaying branches. Yellow brain is a luminous, lemony jelly found on rotting wood – though it’s not feeding on the wood itself, but on another fungus growing there. Yellow stagshorn has more structure, rising in bright, antler-like branches from the stumps and roots of conifers.

Others are a little more subtle. Some examples of turkeytail are bright orange, whilst others are darker and can appear almost dull from a distance. But as you look more closely, they become far more mesmerising.  Those dark disks bracketing the tree trunk are formed by concentric rings, velvety ribbons of orange, red, blue and brown. 

Throw in the vibrant greens of mosses and the glowing yellows of lichens and you have a whole tableaux of winter colours, masterfully painted landscapes on a miniature scale. 

This is just a small sample of winter’s colourful delights. Why not head outside and see how many colours you can spot in nature?