Shrubs: How to Grow Them in Your Garden

Long-lived and resilient, shrubs add structure to the landscape and create a backdrop for garden beds. Diverse species exhibit a range of qualities, including showy flowers, fragrance, fall color, and food and shelter for wildlife. Well-placed shrubs can be the most care-free plants in the garden, needing little attention once they become established.

Shrubs have something to offer year-round. Azaleas, rhododendrons, and bridal wreath spiraea ring in spring with an explosion of early flowers. As the mercury rises, warm breezes bear the heavenly scent of lilacs, giving way to that of roses and clethra. Berried shrubs including holly and viburnum are examples of the bounty of autumn, a season when other shrubs, such as winged euonymus display their brightest foliage colors. Broad-leaved and needled evergreen shrubs carry the garden through winter. As the new year begins, the carmine bark of red-osier dogwood shows its richest color, and witch hazel defies nature by blooming during the coldest season of the year.

Use shrubs to fill out the space under trees or to feather the edge between wooded and open areas. A shrub grouping requires little care, and can take the place of trees in small gardens. Almost every house appears more anchored-with a few shrubs around its foundation, and farther from the house shrubs can frame desirable views, screen out undesirable ones, or soften the look of walls or fences. Some, such as hydrangeas, even thrive in containers.

To grow shrubs successfully, you must find the right match for your situation. The plant’s requirements must come first, because a shrub that’s unhealthy from being grown in an inappropriate spot will never live up to its potential. The entries that follow provide all this information and more. The shrubs presented here are easy to establish and maintain. Some require no fertilizing or pruning, and rarely need watering once established, because the root system grows deep and extensive, and has no trouble finding nutrients and moisture.