Shrub club
Hail spring’s superstars
GIVE your weather-worn garden a facelift with a trip to the garden centre and stock up on the showiest shrubs.
You can’t beat bread-and-butter ones like Japanese kerria, loved for its double yellow flowers that resemble small roses.
It is at home in the garden planted alongside cottage border classics such as lungworts and hellebores.
Kerria grows well in sun and partial shade and is easy-care. Where space is tight, trim and train as an espalier on fences or the side of the house.
The flowers of forsythia come in various shades of yellow and appear in very early spring before the leaves appear. It makes a large but dull shrub for the rest of the year so plant at the back of a sunny border. There, it can be used as a foil for summer-flowering herbaceous perennials.
The drought-tolerant flowering currant, Ribes sanguineum, produces brilliant red flowers now. There are choice varieties, such as Pulborough Scarlet and White Icicle, which is covered with long-lasting pendent racemes of spicy, pure-white blooms.
Sunshine
They won the RHS Award of Garden Merit – given to plants that are easy to grow and resistant to most pests and diseases.
To add a bit of sunshine to a gloomy spot, try ribes variety Brocklebankii, which has unusual golden-yellow leaves and pink flowers. For modern looks, mulch with grey slate chippings and add a skirt of dark-leaved sweet violets. Viola odorata and Primula Wanda would work well.
If you are lucky enough to have acid soil then find room for early-flowering rhododendrons and azaleas.
The dwarf yakushimanum varieties, known as yaks, make domes of colour up to a metre tall, which in late spring become loaded with blooms.
Acid soil is a must for camellias and sweetly scented white or pink-tinged blooms of Pieris japonica. Pieris flowers are produced in bunches that hang in long clusters against a backdrop of new growth, tinged red.
Their appearance gives it the common name lily-of-the-valley shrub. Give it pride of place in a border with spring bulbs for maximum impact.