Planning a shrub bed for year-round interest

February's gardening tip is from A Year in the Garden by Steven Bradley - newly published this month. Summer offers the perfect opportunity to make plans for your bed, as you sit back and reflect on its present appearance and how you might like to change or improve it. Take inspiration from friends and neighbors, and visit as many show gardens as you can, so you can design the bed now, in preparation for planting in the fall. When choosing plants for a shrub bed, there are a number of factors to consider: the size and shape of the shrub, which colors and forms complement one another, the suitability of a plant for a certain site, and whether or not it grows well in your type of soil.

Creating seasonal interest
One of the best ways to draw attention deep into a bed is to plant winter-flowering subjects at the rear, behind deciduous plants. The winter flowers can be seen through the deciduous shrubs, which will have no leaves on them at this time of year, but from mid-spring until mid-fall, when winter-flowering shrubs tend to be relatively uninteresting, the foliage of the deciduous plants will hide them from view.

Conifers and broad-leaved evergreens take center stage in winter, their attractive foliage often contrasting with orange, red, and yellow berries. There are also flowers at this time of year, with yellow predominating, and deciduous shrubs with brightly colored stems.

Plants with good winter flower color
Camellia sasanqua cultivars
Chimonanthus praecox
Jasminum nudiflorum
Mahonia x media cultivars
Rhododendron mucronulatum
Viburnum x bodnantense

Plants with good winter stem color
Cornus alba ( pictured left )
Cornus stolonifera
Kerria japonica
Leycesteria formosa
Rubus thibetanus
Salix sachalinensis 'Sekka'

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