Shrubs for a small garden

Hi,

my garden is 16x30ft and i would like to put 2-3 shrubs in to give it some structure. There are currently no plants in my garden at all (new house, garden was a mess so had to start from scratch. New turf going down next week). can anyone recommend a couple of nice shrubs? I was thinking of a butterfly bush (is that a budhliea (sp)) as i like the flowers and that they attract insects, but can it be kept compact as i know they can get pretty big? Or would a couple of evergreen bushes be better? I also plan to put an apple tree in the garden to help with the structure issue!

Thanks

 

You can keep Buddleia in check, that's the beauty of it. A severe, and I mean severe pruning in early Spring will do that.

Other than that, you probably need slow growing plants - try Euonymus, which is also evergreen and comes in different shades and variegation (is that a word?).

HTH?

 

Euonymus is very slow growing however! If you want something to fill out a bit, then something else might be better, unless you got for a larger specimen.

 

Hello Busybee

I garden in a small space and I have learnt - mostly the hard way - that plants really need to earn their keep when you haven't got much room. You want things which will look good right through the year, which means that the overall shape of a plant and the beauty of its leaves are probably going to be more important than flowers. This sounds boring - but you can always bring a lovely, green garden to life with a few pots of flowers if the permanent plants look good.

The problem with buddleia is that, although it looks pretty when in flower, it can look rather dire in the winter. It has a somewhat gawky shape and, if pruned hard, you just end up with a bunch of stumpy twigs to look at out of season. I don't want to put you off entirely, however. There is a variety called 'Nanho Blue' which only grows to just over a metre and has smallish leaves and slender stems. It is probably better for a small garden than some of the larger varieties - although I had better say that I have no direct experience of growing it! You can buy it online from the Duchy of Cornwall nursery http://www.duchyofcornwallnursery.co.uk, amongst others.

One of the shrubs I like most is the Christmas Box, Sarcococca confusa. It makes a small, neat mound of shiny evergreen leaves which are a good backdrop for other things and it never gets out of hand - although, once established, it doesn't mind a bit of a prune if you do need to give it a haircut. It likes shade, so it is ideal for a gloomy corner. Christmas Box, as the name suggests, blooms in the winter when there is nothing much else about. You probably wouldn't even notice the tiny white flowers .... if it wasn't for the fact that they have a delicious scent. It's widely available at garden centres and online.

 

I will have a look at that smaller buddleia claralou but i know what you mean about them looking a bit of a mess the rest of the year. What does the christmas box look like the rest of the year? Just it's leaves i guess? I will google it.

Aaron i would prob prefer something a little faster growing. I'm a bit impatient like that!! :hehe: Thanks for the help!

 

Sarracocca looks lovely all year round - lovely, glossy, dark green leaves. It's slow growing as well though!

Most shrubs can be pruned to keep them in shape. There is always Cornus that looks good in Winter with it's coloured bark and in summer with different sorts of foliage. Another ideal plant for somewhere that dries out in Summer and is a bog in Winter (ie, clay!).

 

Hi again. Aaron's right - sarcococca IS slow growing, which can seem a bit of a bore when you're starting out. But, rather like people, the plant which grows on you fastest isn't always the one you want to stick around forever ...

I'm currently digging up all my many mistakes and starting again. So here are a few shrubs which worked out - and a few which didn't.

Skimmia japonica A nice, rounded little shrub with evergreen leaves, growing to 3-5 feet. It's quite tough and doesn't need to be mollycoddled. It has candles of white flowers in the spring and some (female) varieties also produce a nice crop of red berries later on. You need to plant both male and female plants to get the berries - nurseries generally give this information on the label. Skimmia 'fragrans', which I grow, doesn't produce fruits but the flowers have a powerful lily-of-the-valley scent.

Viburnum fragrans (farreri). A large shrub which grows to over 3 metres high - and therefore pretty unsuitable for a small garden. However, this is one mistake which has worked out quite well. It serves as a small tree in my garden and because of its upright habit it doesn't take up too much room. It's unremarkable (but not unpleasant) in the summer but for an amazingly long time in autumn/winter it produces clusters of pinkish flowers on leafless branches. They have a delicious scent which wafts into the house - to me, it smells a bit like those sugared almond sweets an ancient relative used to give us to crack our teeth on when we were kids. A closely related plant, Viburnum bodnantense 'Dawn' is often sold at garden centres.

Shrub roses. Oh dear. Not a pretty sight. Roses have lovely flowers but I think even Wiseoldowl would have to agree that they are not always the best looking shrubs. They look lovely in huge botanical gardens where armies of gardeners tie the shoots in to wooden frames and generally primp and pamper but most are not good in a small space. I'll have another go at growing these if and when I ever have a garden which is big enough to do them justice. And I can bear the thought of black spot, rust, mildew, sawfly, greenfly ....

Dwarf rhododendrons/evergreen azaleas These hate my chalky soil, so I can't grow them in my borders at all. Up till recently I didn't like them much anyway - I think it might have something to do with the fact that my mum and dad were obsessive collectors of them in their younger days, and I have traumatic early memories of being dragged round specialist nurseries in all weathers. But recently I've changed my mind and I think some of the smaller varieties are rather nice. I have just planted Rhododendron 'Scarlet Wonder' in a pot. It has lovely little evergreen leaves and I have high hopes of a good display of red flowers when it is a bit bigger. Worth a go as a border plant if you don't have alkaline soil.

Ceanothus veitchianus If you want fast-growing and evergreen, this is your plant. The tiny little twig I planted in my garden seemed to grow overnight into a ten foot monster. It took over a large chunk of my tiny garden, but it did produce the most magnificent patch of blue flowers in May/June. Then, one day, it just gave up the ghost completely, leaving me with a major task to clear out the dead trunk. I've since found that this often happens - ceanothus tends to be short-lived. So I would avoid the large ceanothus cultivars, but there are some smaller ones which look tempting. Ceanothus 'Concha' is supposed to have a maximum height of 1.8 metres.

Hope this helps

 

I hope you're leaving some space for a small herbaceous perennial border? Ok, not brilliant looking in Winter but it makes up for it in Summer and your choice is almost limitless in colour, size and fragrance.

 

I have a very small garden and I've found a few bits and bobs that work for me...... I have planted climbers on all the fences and 3 years in, they are looking pretty good! I've used every green climbers so verrrigated Jasmine, evergreen honeysuckle, a wine berry, climbing hydrengea (for the panel which gets no sun) and I've trained the montana from next door to climb through the decimated hedge (I cut it all back as its a horrid thing which blocked all sunlight from my garden but it will never grow back so the jasmine and montana grow through it....)

I've also got a camelia, which looks lovely all year and flowers over the winter. Then everything else is things I can cut back at different times of year and bulbs so for example my dicentra grows really big, but finishes flowering by the end of may and I cut it right back ready for my agapanthus to flower.... my lupins flower in may/june but are done by august so I cut them back ready for my dalias to flower and I have loads of bulbs that flower at different times of the year too.......

I have a load of fruits in pots and in between the flowers I grow veg too. This works for me as I am making the most of my space all year around, but it has taken a lot of mistakes and research to get it to here. It might be worth doing a bit of research to see what might work best for you?

 

This looks like a nice shrub - plenty of variety. Are they easy to keep? Any special requirements? Can you recommend a particualar species as most of the ones in my book grow pretty big!

 

These look quite nice so i will certainly look into whether they will work in my garden

 

This is very helpful! Thank you! I am currently looking in to what will work in my garden rather than just buying things on impulse. It sounds like you do a good job of making your garden working all year round - is it hard work?

 

No, sorry, I don't know which ones I have! But I have a lovely variegated Cornus, cream and green leaves and red bark. It was only planted 18 months ago right next to a path and I spent all year hacking bits off when it got too big, which it didn't seem to mind.

The beauty of Cornus is that they need to be cut down hard in early Spring, in order to get the coloured bark the following winter. Bit like Buddleia (although that's to prevent it getting woody and ungainly).

PS I have a small garden and it's packed to the gills. I too laid turf 2 years ago and half of it has now been removed so I have a smaller 'lawn' than I do garden!:hehe:

 

It depends on what you call hard work.... once everything was planted (bulbs etc) it's pretty easy to manage... plant seed for the veg every year, weed regularly, water often and chop stuff back when its done flowering...... so its pretty easy to manage really...