 After two years at Erfurt he went to the School of Horticulture in Potsdam, graduating in Botanics, and then became head gardener at the Botanical Garden of Poppelsdorf near Bonn.In 1867 he went to the Paris World Exposition and settled there, working first as a labourer and then as head gardener in the Tuileries Garden.As the Franco-Prussian War approached, the increasingly tense atmosphere in Paris forced Winter to move south via Marseilles and Cannes to Hyères in the Côte d'Azur, where he worked as a plant illustrator for Charles Huber Freres & Co, a prominent nursery and principal source of novelty plants during that period.