Find the right shrubs for your garden

Shrubs are among the garden's most versatile plants, not only serving as a background to other displays, but also providing their own varying colours and textures. We'll go over the most common shrubs and help you choose the right fit for your garden.

•  Because shrubs are substantial and long-lived, they play a vital role in turning a patch of ground into a garden.
• The difference between a shrub and a tree is not just a matter of height. Both have stout, woody branches that stay alive the entire year, but a shrub initiates its branches at, near, or below ground level, while a tree usually has a single trunk with branches starting some distance up.
• Large shrubs can be pruned to look like small trees, and many trees can be trained to grow like shrubs.
• Filling the middle ground between trees and flowers, shrubs are the permanent framework around which showy annuals and perennials are interwoven year by year. Shrubs can be used for foundation plantings and borders, interplanted with flowers, used in their prostrate or creeping forms as ground covers, or encouraged to form their own striking silhouettes.
• Shrubs add emphasis and variety to a garden, and can help keep things looking lively in the winter.

• A deciduous plant drops its leaves in the fall, often with a spectacular display of colour prior to leaf-drop. It spends the winter in bare-framed dormancy before leafing out again in the spring.
• Compared with evergreens, which retain their foliage all winter, many deciduous shrubs make up for their winter drabness with a spectacular spring or summer show of flowers, and perhaps with a fall display of coloured leaves as well.
• Many gardeners value deciduous shrubs because they change with the seasons. Also, most deciduous shrubs are less expensive than evergreens and grow more rapidly.
• On the other hand, evergreens provide winter colour and offer certain other advantages. For example, many kinds thrive in shady places and they give the landscape year-round stability.
• There are broad-leaved evergreens, and there are those with needles. The farther south you go, the wider choice of broad-leaved evergreens you'll have.
• Needle or coniferous evergreens flourish throughout most of North America. They offer a wide range of shapes, colours, and textures, and are often best planted along with deciduous shrubs.
• A shrub may be upright, rounded, weeping, or spreading. The shape you choose depends largely on your overall plan for the garden.

• If you have a small garden, make sure that the shrubs you choose are in line with the garden size and won't be too large when they mature.
• Alternatively, plant shrubs such as the red-twigged dogwood (Cornus stolonifera) that can be cut back significantly every couple of years.

• You should decide before planting whether adjacent shrubs should be in flower at the same time, and if so, how well the colours of their blossoms will combine. You can weave a striking tapestry by alternating colourful and plain shrubs, or ones with complementary foliage colours. You can also combine masses of the same colourful shrub for a striking effect.
• You can even plan seasonally, using colour to enliven the winter landscape and suggest coolness on sweltering summer days.

There's a lot to consider when looking to add shrubs to your garden. Careful planning is well worth the effort though, and will reward you with a striking display that can tie your whole garden together. So use this guide and get planting!