Gardening expert reveals the five plants everyone should be growing this winter

A gardening expert has revealed the five flowers that she thinks everyone should be growing during this winter.

Writing in her recently released book, The Money-Saving Gardener, Anya Lautenbach shared her top flower picks to place in your gardens, as temperatures continue to plummet.

Explaining how our gardens 'still have so much to offer' during the winter months, she said: "I personally love hellebores, Algerian iris (Iris unguicularis), Hepatica, the climber Clematis cirrhosa, and Erica carnea."

While she claimed that winter still provides an opportunity to display some of her favourite flowers, she also advised fellow gardeners to take the chance to focus on other areas of interest.

The expert added: "And, when flowers are relatively few, it's worth focusing on other areas of interest, like the textured bark of Prunus serrula, which looks magical when catching some late afternoon sun or meeting the frost, or the fiery coloured stems of dogwoods.

"With a few well-chosen additions, there's no reason for your garden not to grab your attention, even in the depths of winter. With a few well-chosen additions, there's no reason for your garden not to grab your attention, even in the depths of winter."

Anya is not the only gardening expert to recommend one winter flower, as much-loved former Gardeners' World presenter, Alan Titchmarsh also named the Iris unguicularis as his favourite flower to grow during this time of year.

Writing about the flower in his The Gardener's Almanac book he said: "It sits like an unruly rug of linear leaves for most of the year, and then up through that haystack of foliage in December and January push spears of palest amethyst, which open to reveal the most delicate of lavender blue iris flowers that look as though a puff of wind would destroy them."

Meanwhile, Anya also highlighted the importance of avid gardeners making sure that they keep on top of outdoor preservation during this time of year, saying to: "Order seeds for next year (if you were unable to collect your own in autumn, take hardwood cuttings of fruit and ornamental shrubs, take root cuttings of plants such as echinacea and verbascum, keep pruned branches to use as plant support in the spring and store tender plants in a frost-free environment."