Random Thoughts on Low-Growing Shrubs

These are random thoughts, and, as such, no attempt is made to be highly critical or comprehensive in the comments offered. However, these May days provide an excellent opportunity to study the lesser known low-growing shrubs in arboretums, in parks, in other people’s gardens and in nurseries. Where is there a gardener so lacking in imagination who has not learned to improve his own garden when he has seen plants in the right place in some one else’s dooryard or border.

Barbering and shearing are all too common practices in small gardens where space is limited and large-scale shrubs outgrow the areas allotted to them. Plants trimmed into globular, pyramidal or box-like shapes are appropriate in formal gardens, but they are definitely out of place in the average home landscape. And yet, there are many desirable low-growing or dwarf shrubs that are suitable for the small place. Competent nurserymen everywhere are continually introducing new plants to fit the needs of small gardens. Let’s learn to know and use more of them; they will make your garden easier to care for and more pleasing to look at – they will look right.

The floribunda roses are, perhaps, the most rewarding and floriferous of all small flowering shrubs, and gardeners are learning how to plant them more effectively with each passing year.

Connoisseurs of choice garden plants will probably turn up their noses at Spiraea humalda, Anthony Waterer, but in hot, sunny places where its flat crimson heads of bloom are needed for color, it can always be depended on to make a creditable showing. Its foliage is clean, and were it not so common, it might be more greatly cherished.

Euonymus alata compacta, the winged spindle-tree, is a most satisfactory compact-growing shrub, averaging four to six feet in height. Of dense form, it has corky-winged branches and colorful fruits, which show off well in the Winter landscape, and attractive clean foliage throughout the growing season which assumes brilliant color with the coming of Autumn.

No small garden today is complete without a few yews. The familiar Japanese upright and spreading forms are fairly rapid growers, and of ten take up more space than a small garden can provide. However, there are Taxus cuspidata var. densa and T. cuspidata minima for places where the rich dark texture of this evergreen is needed. You may want it for a low hedge or in the foreground of some larger shrub. Thayer’s variety of Japanese yew is little known to gardeners; in habit it becomes a wide, slow-growing handsome evergreen, and fruits freely in the Autumn landscape.

It is easy to find potted plants of the familiar Cotoneaster horizontalis with its decorative fan-like growth, dainty flowers, colorful fruits and lustrous foliage. When it starts to get out of bounds, a little judicious pruning will keep it where you want it to stay. For partial shade C. dammeri can be counted to give the desired evergreen effect. From the Himalaya Mountains there is C. microphylla, about three feet in height.

In rock and wall gardens, where the Summer sun shines all day, what can he more colorful in late Spring and early Summer than showy forms of the sub-shrub helianthemums. Give them a well-drained spot, with neutral or slightly sweet soil. When the plants have been established a few years they may get leggy; trim them after flowering and give them some fertilizer.

The black-berried honks are not nearly as well known as they should be. With the skillful use of the pruning shears, they can be kept within bounds for informal or clipped hedges and make outstanding specimens in the broad-leaved evergreen group. Ilex crenata convexa, with its glossy leaves and pleasing habit of growth, is hard to surpass where a low foundation effect is needed. A clipped branch need never go to waste, since it can be used in a flower arrangement. For a dwarf hedge or specimen use, I. crenata microphylla is ideal.

Box-wood is probably the most outstanding broad-leaved evergreen in cultivation in America to help a garden develop age, character and atmosphere. It has been grown, loved and cherished on both sides of the Atlantic for generations, and whether trimly clipped or allowed to grow in its characteristic billowy mass, it always evokes comment. It is, not only its rich dark foliage, but its peculiar fragrance, especially after a rain, that has an appeal for those of us who love a garden. The common box, Buxus sempervirens, is no plant for small gardens, but the form B. sempervirens suffruticosa is ideal for specimen use, for accents, hedges or the rock garden. Where Winter temperatures are normally more than 10 degree below zero, the little-leaf box, B. microphylla, can be used.

By D. J. F.

Related Articles Of Interest:

• Cotoneasters – Rockspray, Dammeri, Horizontalis – They Come In Variety
• Ten Shrubs That Are Outstanding
• Cherry Laurel Plant for Performance
• Landscaping Shrubs Provide Great Texture and Colorfulness