Using Landscaping Shrubs to Their Full Potential

If trees and paths are the skeleton that your garden is built around, then landscaping shrubs equate to the body's muscles because they make up the most visible features of your garden. Landscaping shrubs come in all shapes and sizes, but most are very easy to grow and give a lifetime of pleasure for a very low outlay.

You can use landscaping shrubs in groups as a shrubbery, individually or as a hedge.

Using Landscaping Shrubs in Groups

When you buy landscape shrubs, especially if you buy cheap ones from discount supermarkets, they will be VERY small, sometimes just two sticks. It is difficult to envisage the fully grown shrubs. The label on each shrub will give its overall size. Make sure that you attach labels to any shrubs that do not have them.

You need to plant your large shrubs far enough apart that when they are fully grown, they will just touch together. Most people plant their landscaping shrubs much too close together, meaning they have to move some shrubs and risk losing them, because it is difficult to transplant mature shrubs successfully.

If you have three shrubs that say they grow to 6 feet across then plant them in a triangle with the shrubs 6 feet apart from each other. Fill in the spaces between the shrubs with smaller shrubs that you can move once they become too crowded. Alternatively plant tall perennials or biennials between the shrubs, like 'Honesty'. These can be moved very easily later,

Choose shrubs for each group that flower at different times. Have some spring flowering shrubs, some summer flowering and some winter display shrubs. The only exception would be a shrubbery you were planting in a part of the garden that is only used in summer, where you would plant mainly summer flowering landscape shrubs.

Mix a few evergreen shrubs into groups you can see from the house in the middle of winter and into any shrubberies you are planting for privacy.

Using Landscaping Shrubs Individually

(Some larger shrubs make magnificent centrepieces for a bed or a lawn. Copper beechPurpurea) has copper coloured young leaves in spring, deep purple leaves in summer and copper coloured leaves in autumn. It looks wonderful in the centre of a grassed area.

In a large garden buddleia can look well in a central bed surrounded by grass.

Using Landscaping Shrubs as a Hedge

Hedges are very useful, both to provide privacy along garden or yard boundaries and to divide your garden into distinct areas.

Wherever possible you should use a wide variety of different landscape shrubs in your hedge. Plant your hedge with two or three staggered rows of shrubs, rather than a single row. It will not be so much a hedge so much as a linear shrubbery. Plant evergreen shrubs in groups of three or four so that nesting birds in spring are more likely to use them.

Use informal hedges of landscape shrubs to screen off compost heaps and working areas of your garden. Use them to provide shelter from the wind and to divide a large area into several smaller ones.

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