GARDENING : Flowering Shrubs Are Blooming Solution to Landscape Woes

Whatever your landscape needs, flowering shrubs and vines can tackle the challenge. Whether you want to create a hedge, hide a shed or cover a trellis, this sampling of easy-to-grow plants can fill the bill.

Blooming shrubs not only add beauty to your home, but they can also help solve your landscape problems. Many shrubs can be used as hedges or screens to block views or to create privacy. Grouped, shrubs can form a border that matches the color show of annuals and perennials. Specimen shrubs can be the star in a small garden or highlight a garden pool or bench. Count on shrubs for year-round interest. Whether shrubs are blooming, showing fall foliage, bearing fruit or standing bare in a wintry garden, they paint the landscape with colors and textures that change every season.

Vines are one of the most versatile garden plants because they adapt so easily to even the most imaginative garden design. They are breathtaking whether spilling out of containers, creating living walls or scaling the sides of buildings. Vines can cascade over walls and pergolas to create green-sheltered worlds and can hide a multitude of garden “sins,” such as storage sheds, broken down fences or tree stumps.

The most striking feature of the vines is their flowers, which are in colors as varied as a painter’s palette. Many of these flowers bear scents that fill an entire garden with sweet aromas.

Getting started with shrubs and vines isn’t difficult. You can find container-grown or bare-root shrubs and vines at a local nursery or garden center. All they need to provide color for years to come is a spot in your garden to call home.