6 ideas for choosing and maintaining your shrubs

Shrubs are the backbone of a garden's structure, and they often require little care once they are established. If you're considering planting a couple of shrubs to complete your landscape, check out these six ideas for choosing and maintaing them.

Season after season, shrubs can help anchor your house in the landscape, define boundaries, direct foot traffic and provide a constantly changing tapestry of colour.

• Dwarf shrubs are the perfect choices for small gardens, where there may not be room enough for trees.
• In larger yards, shrub hedges — or even individual specimen plants — are the easiest way to divide and define open spaces.

Designing with shrubs can begin at the nursery, where you can place shrubs together to see how they work when growing side by side.

• In addition to colour and texture, take a plant's natural profile into account when designing with shrubs.
• Upright and pyramidal shapes are rigid and more formal, while mounding or spreading growth habits appear more relaxed.
• Weeping shrubs make dramatic focal points.

Some shrubs bloom in spring and early summer and then offer little else.

• Choose shrubs that have many talents: interesting fruits, fall colour, attractive bark and a pleasing silhouette, even when bare.
• Good choices for a long-term display include barberry, euonymus, leucothoe, pieris, privet, mahonia, nandina, snowberry and viburnum.

• Matching a shrub's mature size to the proposed planting site will save you years of struggle to keep it in bounds.

Good quality shrubs sold by reputable nurseries include plant tags that tell you their mature height and width.

Reduce weeding chores around shrubs by covering the ground with a fabric weed barrier. Then cover the barrier with attractive organic mulch, such as bark nuggets or pine needles.

Leaves may be a shrub's dominant feature, but not all shrubs are green.

• Foliage colour can range from burgundy to gold to blue-gray to all shades of green.
• Red-twig dogwoods are most valued for the striking colour of their bare branches, which are particularly vivid against a background of winter snow.

• Fertilize each spring with a complete timed-release fertilizer, which will slowly provide nutrients for several months.

Use an acid-based fertilizer for acid-loving shrubs, such as azaleas, camellias, garden pieris and rhododendrons.