Flowering Shrubs
Add Beauty and Style to Your Backyard with Flowering Shrubs
To discover the secret of adding attractive structure with explosions of color to your garden, plant your choice of flowering shrubs. Choose by shape, height, blossom color and even winter interest, but don’t leave these plants out of your plan.
Shrubs of any kind lend shape and structure to your yard. Over a flat landscape, well placed shrubs can provide curves and mounds for visual interest and direction. They are perfect for hiding unsightly necessities, such as foundations and unattractive fencing. Shrubs have more staying power than most flowers and provide anchors and divisions in landscape plans.
Flowering shrubs deliver all of these benefits and more. In spring, your garden will be a colorful masterpiece when you have generously planted various shrubs, such as forsythia, lilac, flowering dogwood and spirea. The blossoms will often blanket the shrub, showing off its shape and height with boldness. It is an excellent and nearly carefree way to welcome the spring with style.
Almost every shrub has unique needs and some do require more attention than others. Most flowering shrubs will look better, have more plentiful blooms and carry strong through the balance of the season with pruning. Pruning the shrubs properly with allow them to concentrate their energy where you desire.
After a shrub flowers the plant turns it attentions to forming seeds in place of the blossoms. When you remove dead flowers (dead heading), you are redirecting that attention back to the core of the plant. This will help to maintain dense growth and create the potential for more blooms next season. It may seem counterproductive, but cutting your shrub and bush will help to produce a better quality plant.
Knowing when to prune your shrub is important. Some shrubs, such as the forsythia and many other early spring bloomers, begin to form next year’s flowers along with their summer growth. Watch for buds growing underneath or behind foliage or bumps and nubs forming on the branches. If you prune these, you are eliminating blossoms for the next season. Your climate effects the formation of the buds as well, so keep a close eye out and try to record when each of your shrubs sprouts them.
A good idea is to prune your flowering shrub soon after its blossoming time has completed. This is the safest time for most shrubs. Using sharp hand-held secateurs (pruning shears) for thinner branches or loppers for tougher jobs, prune the shrub in the desired way. Be sure to cut off any dead or diseased branches. Then turn your attention to older branches (usually darker and wider then others), pruning them back as far as 12" from the base. Trim off any remaining branches that face inward or clog up the middle of the shrub. You want sunlight and air to flow freely through the branches. Also cut, snip or pull off any dead flowers still left on.
Flowering shrubs can also have benefit to the wildlife that make their home in your yard. In these cases, pruning may be harmful to their interests. Birds enjoy nesting and finding protection in the dense, low to the ground branches of many shrubs. Also, if the shrub produces berries after flowering, the locals may rely on it for food. Shrubs such as bearberry and chokeberry are small mammal and bird favorites.
Nectar that is produced by your shrub’s flowers is also an important element. Insects such as butterflies and bees are attracted to many shrubs in bloom. Although this can be a problem, especially with stinging insects, the overall importance to these creatures in nature is not to be tampered with lightly. Pollinating insects are part of the backbone of gardening. Providing them with nectar will help that support structure to thrive. The beauty and color that butterflies bring to your yard is another added benefit.
Be sure to include different types of flowering shrubs into your landscape. They provide shape and interest all year round, a blazing show of color when in bloom and an array of benefits to the wildlife and insects that populate our world. Get rooted with these mainstays of any garden.