Browse Plants

These shrubs are beautiful, compact, and easy to grow, making them obvious choices for mixed borders, foundation plantings, and naturalizing. The fragrant, bottlebrush flowers are petalless and sweetly-scented.

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Fragrant, cylindrical inflorescences are made up of long, white filaments, and open before the leaves in spring. In autumn, the foliage shades range from blood red to blazing yellow, and every shade in between.

This cultivar of a favorite fall shrub has the same great spring flowers as the rest of the species. But its brilliant fall color remains longer and later than its cousins, holding its strong orange, red, and yellow tones into late November or even early December. 'Jane Platt' also features a mounding habit rather than the upright habit common to the species. Fothergillas are often recommended for shade, but this one is tough enough to be grown between rocks in hot, full sun.

This versatile shrub to 3 feet tall and widestarts the show in spring before even the leaves emerge with 1- to -2-inch long, honey-scented, white, bottlebrush flowers that bloom for several weeks. These are joined soon after by wavy-margined, leathery, blue-green leaves that, in fall, may turn many shades of yellow, orange, and red.

This cultivar boasts single, long-tubed, brick red flowers and dark bronze-red leaves and stems.

This erect shrub grows to 10 feet high and wide and produces many small, tubular, pendent flowers in shades of red, pink, and sometimes white. Flowers are followed by reddish purple fruits. Native to Chile and Argentina, Fuchsia magellanica is hardy in Zones 6-9 and adds bright colors and a tropical feeling to the garden. Use as a specimen or in a bed or border.

This cultivar has dark green leaves with a faint bronze sheen. Its narrow, dangling, red and purple flowers bloom throughout the season.

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This gardenia cultivar features a very tight, upright form that is perfect for smaller gardens. It also boasts increased cold tolerance while maintaining the lustrous dark green foliage and abundant fragrant blooms you’ve come to expect from this genus.

This compact, bushy shrub has red shoots and ovate, pointed, glossy dark green leaves. Arching racemes of urn-shaped white flowers tinged with pink appear in late spring and early summer, maturing to fleshy, spherical, purple fruit measuring a half-inch across.

Through the fall and into winter, pincushion hakea provides beautiful cut flowers for the holidays; the foliage and seedpods are also great for arrangements. You can prune it into a bushy shape or a slender, small tree. As a member of the Protea family, pincushion hakea does not like phosphorus fertilizer, and like most Australian plants, it prefers to be well mulched so that its specialized roots can extract nutrients from the mulch layer.

This vase-shaped, deciduous shrub, up to 12 feet tall and wide, has ascending branches and bright green leaves that turn yellow in autumn. It produces large yellow flowers in mid- and late winter on the bare branches. A cross between H. japonica and H. mollis.

This witch hazel is an upright shrub up to 12 feet tall and wide, with oval, softly hairy, mid-green leaves that turn yellow in autumn. Fragrant flowers are yellow, with crimped petals, appearing on bare branches in mid- and late winter.

This vase-shaped deciduous shrub grows up to 12 feet tall and wide, with ascending branches and bright green leaves that turn yellow in autumn. Clusters of sulfur-yellow flowers appear in mid- and late winter.

The native common witch hazel is an understory plant that becomes leggy if it has to reach for light, but in the open, it develops into a graceful, spreading shrub about 20 feet tall. Its broad leaves turn a clear, bright yellow in the autumn. The abundance of pale yellow fall flowers that accompanies the foliage comes as a wonderful late-season surprise. The deceptively fragile-looking blossoms that appear near the end of October seem to keep winter at bay for weeks.

This evergreen, California-native shrub grows to 20 feet tall and wide and produces abundant clusters of tiny white flowers in early summer, which attract beneficial insects that help control pests. This is followed by bright red berries that feed wildlife in fall and winter. The only species of its genus, Toyon is closely related to the genus Photinia.

'Diana' has deep green foliage and large, pure white flowers that bloom from mid- to late summer. Unlike some other roses of Sharon, its flowers remain open at night. It requires little maintenance and, once established, will tolerate extreme heat, drought, and poor soil. -Judith Ireland, Regional Reports: Northeast, Fine Gardening issue #122

Creamy, six-inch flower heads form flattened spheres above heart-shaped leaves from June through frost.

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Exceptional and enormous creamy flowerheads up to one foot across form billowy, flattened spheres that withstand the rain well. Leaves are large and downy.

Hydrangea arborescens is a southeastern U.S. native shrub with a rounded habit to 5 feet tall and domes of creamy white flowers over a long period beginning in early summer. The cultivar 'Grandiflora' has larger, showier flowerheads than the species. They grow to 6 to 8 inches across.