When I went shopping for flowering shrubs to plant on the bank below the pond I knew about as much about my choices as a second grader knows about botany. Catalogs love to exalt over a shrub's good points, but rarely do they tell you about the bad points. Reading about a plant in a good garden book can help, but the best way is to grow it.
Hank had made it very clear when I described my landscaping idea that I mustn't choose anything that would grow tall enough to block the view of the meadow where deer often grazed in the evening, so my thought for the top of the bank was cotoneaster, a low-growing evergreen with inconspicuous blossoms but bright red berries in the fall. Sad to say, the nursery didn't carry cotoneasters and claimed they did very poorly in the East.
Since nurseries undoubtedly know more than I did, I finessed that choice and decided to plant potentillas at the top of the bank. These hardy shrubs never get any taller than 3 feet and have attractive feathery leaves. Their small white or yellow blossoms are produced from June until October. I picked 3 white and 2 yellow.
Since I was trying to cover a span of about fifty feet, I needed something in between these shrubs that was also low-growing. I'd been reading about one that sounded just right, Daphne, known as garland flower. It's a broad-leaved evergreen with a spreading habit, rarely growing more than a foot tall. It has bright pink flowers that have "a delicious perfume" according to the catalogs. I thought these shrubs would do well in between the potentillas, so I bought three.
Sad to say when I removed them from their containers the soil around every one fell away, leaving their roots bare. They'd obvious just been repotted. None survived, despite my careful planting and lots of watering. Happy to say, when I took them back to the nursery I got my money back!
Eventually the potentillas were not only thriving, but re-rooting at the tips of some of their branches, and by the following summer I was able to cut these babies off from their mother plants and use them to fill in the spaces left by the daphnes.
For the next level of shrubs I bought several bridal wreaths, Spiraea prunifiolia, pictured behind the potentillas. Their graceful branches make cascades of white blooms in late May. Although these bushes can get quite tall, they do well when pruned back. I also indulged in several azalea varieties, one pink, one peach and one white with veriegated leaves, but as you can see, the variegated one has never done well. Every spring I cut out its dead branches, but there are always more the next year.
Sick Azalea Sand Cherry Andromeda
I bought two sand cherries, Prunus cistena, whose leaves are a lovely wine red, making a nice contrast to the greenery of other shrubs. Unfotunately they prefer to grow up, not out, despite my pruning efforts, and both their tiny pink flowers and small black berries are hardly noticable. Besides the sand cherries, I chose a handsome evergreen andromeda with its clusters of white blooms and several wet-loving black alders for the bottom of the bank where the overflow from the pond forms a little brook.
By then I'd spent so much money I had to stop and adjust my thinking. Since forsythias are the least expensive shrub you can buy, I decided to get three. That was a big mistake. I don't like pruned forsythias, but when their branches are allowed to cascade, the plants take up too much space. They do bloom before any other flowering shrub, but in the end I dug them up and transplanted them to the fence line at the far end of the meadow where I could let them get as big and graceful as they cared to.
Deciding I'd spent quite enough money, I planted cork-barked euonymus seedlings that had popped up from the shrubs my mother had given me, the ones that turn a brilliant scarlet each fall, and transplanted several quinces severed from their mothers who live in the perennial border. My kids gave me a hydrangea to add late summer bloom and my friend Angie gave me a viburnum with large white blooms in early spring.
Much as I love the smell of lilacs, I chose not to have any on the bank as I dislike their shape and their mildewed leaves. I have lots of lilacs growing up in the pasture edges to cut for bouquets. There are many other shrubs I could have chosen for the bank - laurels, Rose of Sharon, weigelia - but considering how ignorant I was when I began the project, it's turned out adequately.
The shrubs have grown as fast as teenagers and are now almost thick enough so I don't need to weed in between them every minute, but the nicest thing about the flowering bank is how much the songbirds enjoy it. With forty acres of open meadow surrounding the house, many birds, particularly cardinals, refused to come to my birdfeeders until I offered them the protection of all those shrubs.
