Flowering trees and shrubs
to beautify your garden
Flowers alone aren't enough to make a great garden.
Small trees and shrubs, especially the ones that flower, such as crabapples, lilacs and hydrangeas, are the backbone of your landscape.
Trees grace your property with added height, color and texture all year long.
The best woody plants have flowers in spring or summer and attractive leaves. In autumn, many produce berries or fall color in reds, yellow or golds. In winter, woody plants, especially evergreens, add shape and texture to bare yards.
Using small trees and shrubs in your garden:
The trend is not to segregate flowers in their own beds, but to plant what's called a "mixed border" in which small flowering trees like ornamental pears or shrubs like rhododendrons join perennials in a planting that can look attractive all season.
This style is practical for today's smaller properties, which don't have enough space for separate beds of shrubs and flowers - yet another reason not to stint on the width of your beds.
Trees and shrubs are a lower maintenance way to add all-season color and texture. If you choose carefully, they can be among your easiest-care plants.
A garden populated with one of this and one of that tends to look jumbled and in need of something to pull it all together.
Garden designers recommend planting all except some of the largest stand-alone or specimen plants in odd-numbered groups of three or five. Depending on the space you have available, this is also a good idea with shrubs.
Choosing woody plants that will thrive
Make sure the moisture, soil and sunlight requirements of your chosen tree or shrub match the conditions in your yard. For example, woody plants that grow best in moist situations will do poorly in dry soil areas if they never get watered.
Consider the mature size and shape of the shrubs or trees you want to plant. If there's a major mistake people make in their gardens, it's that they seem to forget that plants grow! And then they spend all sorts of time pruning (generally that means hacking and mutilating) their woody plants to make them smaller.
To make your gardening easier and more pleasurable in the long run, take some time to research the right-sized plants before buying.
Consider plant diversity
Don't just plant what the neighbors have. Sadly most neighborhoods across North America are filled with just a few basic woody plants.
There's a wealth of gorgeous flowering shrubs, as well as trees to choose from, so it shouldn't be too hard to add some plant diversity to your garden.
The garden writer Pam Duthie has an excellent book on choosing interesting and garden-worthy flowering shrubs and small trees.For more information:
Lilacs - scented flowering shrubs for spring
How to grow rhododendrons and azaleas
