It offers multi-seasonal interest. It has one feature that’s so breathtaking that it can get away with being a one-trick pony. It blooms at a time of year when many other shrubs have finished blooming, meaning it’s helpful for sequence-of-bloom planning and achieving more consistent color in the yard.
To narrow down your plant-selection choices further, take into account factors such as favorite flower colors or leaf colors, maintenance needs, and a bush’s ability to attract wildlife to your property. Your goal should be to have at least one bush in the yard that excites you every season of the year. Suited to zones 4 to 8 (full sun to dappled shade), the bush has blooms as showy as any you’ll find in Northern landscapes. It can get as large as five feet tall and wide. Holly’s berries add color to the fall and winter landscapes. These berries also feed some of the wild birds that come to your yard, such as blue jays. An excellent producer of bright red berries is Blue Princess (I. x meserveae ‘Blue Princess’). It has a maximum 15-foot height and 10-foot width. Grow it in zones 5 to 8, in full sun to partial shade. Even if you feel this way, it can be difficult to decide on a type of azalea to grow because there are so many available. Rhododendron x Gable ‘Stewartstonian’ (zones 5 to 8, partial shade, 4 to 5 feet tall and wide) may well help you make up your mind if you’re a lover of fall foliage: Its leaves turn a fabulous red in fall. This early-to-mid-spring bloomer also boasts red flowers. ‘Blue Chiffon,’ with its lavender-blue flowers, is a commonly-grown type. This full-sun plant reaches 8 to 12 feet in height (with a narrower spread) and is best grown in zones 5 to 8. It’s an early-summer bloomer, at which time it offers big clusters of white flowers. By autumn, those flower heads pick up a tinge of pink. More importantly, Hydrangea quercifolia is one of the best fall-foliage shrubs. In winter and spring, with the leaves out of the way, you can appreciate its branches’ interesting peeling park. Give it some afternoon shade in hot climates. Further north, oakleaf hydrangea can take more sun. In fact, insufficient sunlight in the North can lead to disappointing autumn color. Candy Oh (zones 4 to 9, full sun) sports reddish flowers on 3-to-4-foot stems. Just when you think it can’t flower any more for you, it puts out even more blooms, all the while asking for very little maintenance. You can more or less ignore it until (unless) you feel it’s getting too big, at which time you can prune it. But even pruning isn’t the fussy operation we expect with most roses in the case of Candy Oh. The kinds with purple flowers are especially beloved. The ‘Wild River Double’ lilac is one cultivar with purple flowers (12 to 15 feet tall, with a narrower spread, zones 3 to 7, full sun to partial shade). Even gardeners who don’t generally care much for white flowers are blown away by Incrediball. Its rounded flower heads measure some 12 inches across. Grow it in full sun to partial shade in zones 4 to 9.
