Add Timeless Shrubs to Your Garden
From low-growing thyme to towering juniper, this group of herbs adds shape, scent, and permanence to the garden.
December/January 2000
By Geraldine Adamich Laufer
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Lavandula ¥intermedia ‘Grosso’, also known as ‘Fat Spike’ lavender, bows down on the morning after a rain, making a colorful skirt for a sundial in the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
Photography by Geraldine Adamich Laufer
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Horticultural luminaries John L. Creech and Donald Wyman have called woody shrubs “one of the most important groups of commonly grown plants,” but herbal woody shrubs are often overlooked. Deemed herbal because of their fragrance or uses, many hardy herbal shrubs are available to today’s herb gardener.
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When herbal shrubs are included in the landscape, they add beauty, fragrance, and functionality. Shrubs that have herbal uses and aromatic qualities can extend a garden’s herbal theme. Woody plants useful for medicine, seasoning, fragrance, or crafting add a feeling of permanence.
• Try These Shrubs in Your Garden
Shrubs have many functions, including hedges for screening, grouped plants for transitions between trees and perennial herbs, and single plants as focal points.
Hedges and screening enclose spaces in the garden. If you are not lucky enough to have serpentine brick walls (my ultimate goal), try surrounding your garden with a clipped evergreen hedge. For example, I chose a native dwarf holly, Ilex vomitoria ‘Schelling’s Dwarf’, to surround my Shakespeare Garden. It encloses an oval 40 feet long by 30 feet wide. Although it needs the gas-powered hedge shears once every year or two to keep it from spreading outward, it never grows too high. Taller hedges can create useful visual barriers, physical barriers, and windbreaks and contribute to the design or pictorial effect of the landscape.
Hedges can add drama and excitement to the garden. Many gardeners can remember hedge features from gardens they’ve visited, such the famous central roundel at Sissinghurst Castle, the garden of Vita Sackville-West. Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia boasts eight miles of tightly clipped evergreen hedges.
Deciduous herbal shrubs may also be used for hedges. I’ve seen the old flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum) clipped into a very dense, pretty hedge. It had bare branches in winter but was clothed in a mass of pink flowers in April. This year, clipped American beech, Fagus americana, showed up as a hedge in two of the Atlanta gardens on the “Gardens for Connoisseurs Tour.”
Plants useful as transitions between herbaceous perennials and trees range in size from the diminutive woody herbs such as thymes, sages, and rosemaries (known as sub-shrubs) to stately, multi-trunk shrubs like serviceberry (Amelanchier stolonifera) and bay laurel.
Seasonal flowers, fragrance, textural foliage, colorful bark, berries, and leaves are among the features that might recommend an herbal shrub for use in a mixed border. Spreading shrubs are useful as large-scale ground covers and to fill in horizontal spaces. Larger shrubs can act as scaffolding for climbing roses, golden hops, or fragrant honeysuckle vines to grow up through their branches or as background to a mixed border, creating a stair-stepped planting scheme.
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