Guest Author - Hellie T.

Shrubs both evergreen and deciduous make a good foil for your English Garden perennials. Most can be grown in large pots or in borders.

If you only have a small space then one or two shrubs in containers will help you get that abundant feeling that is so evocative of an English Garden.


Here is my selection of shrubs - all like a sunny spot to grow in and are frost hardy.

Common Myrtle
is evergreen and has lovely aromatic leaves and scented pale pink flowers in mid spring. This is a real must for an English Garden.It is often included in wedding bouquets.

Forsythia
is a shrub that will stand pruning as it can be an untidy shrub bt makes up for it by having bright golden yellow flowers that appear before the leaves.

Skimmia japonica – fructo-alba
is evergreen and has aromatic dark green leaves and small white flowers in spring followed by white berries. This plant is quite dwarf and ideal for pots.

Skimmia japonica – Rubella
grows bigger than the above and has dark red flower buds that open to white flowers in early spring.

Mahonias
have lovely delicate pale yellow flowers or brighter golden yellow which are softly scented and flower from late winter through to spring.

Flowering Currants
are deciduous and have aromatic leaves and bright pink or red flowers and very easy to grow.

Spirea vanhouttei
is a deciduous shrub that has arching sprays of white flowers in late spring


Lilac
has wonderfully scented blooms in late spring and comes in whites, creams, purples and pinks and flowers in late spring.


Berberis - buxifolia Nana
is an evergreen with scented yellow flowers and Berberis julianne is also evergreen with dark green leaves and yellow flowers.

Viburnham juddi or carlesii
are deciduous bushy plants that have scented flowers in pinks and whites

Deutzias
are deciduous bushy shrubs that are easy to grow and have scented pinky white flowers in late spring.

Woolly willow or salix lanata
is a lovely shrub. It is deciduous and has silver/grey leaves with yellow/green catkins in late spring

Broom
comes in all shades of yellow and some reds. It is easy to grow from seed and has pea-like flowers all spring.

Daphne mezereum
is a deciduous upright bush that has scented pink/purple flowers in early spring before its leaves appear.

Jasminum japonica or winter jasmine
can grow up to 10ft or 3 metres but if you have a spot it is well worth growing. good on fences, trellis and arches. It has scented yellow flowers in early spring.

Enjoy your garden