I recently extended one of my flowerbeds that is bordered by an arborvitae hedge. I was going to fill in the back row with arborvitaes again because they take up little room with their vertical growth habit (meaning more room for perennials!), do an excellent job of bringing out the colors of the flower garden with their lush green backdrop, and stay green all winter long while everything else is drab. But honestly, how many arborvitaes can a person grow in a small, city lot (apparently 40 so far!)?
The new space is under an oak tree so I had to narrow down my choices to shrubs that can handle partial shade. I’m intrigued by Pagoda Dogwoods because they have beautiful horizontal branching and produce berries that attract birds. Pagoda Dogwoods are natives that thrive in the forest understory so my location is nearly perfect.
I’ve been changing my mind about buying a Pagoda Dogwood just about every day, but in the mean time I’ve been distracted by another shrub, the Koreanspice Viburnum. There is a full-grown specimen at the Flower Factory and while shopping there, my friend and I stopped dead in our tracks when we encountered the flowering shrub’s amazing scent. It’s as delicious as the smell of old-fashioned lilacs. The shrub can tolerate partial shade and grows 6 to 8 feet high and wide. The leaves are textured and a bit fuzzy and are not supposed to be at all attractive to Japanese Beetles.
When I looked up Koreanspice Viburnums in one of my books, it described the plant as having carnation-scented blooms. That didn’t fit with my experience at all, and I feared that perhaps the employee at the Flower Factory had misunderstood which shrub my friend and I were anxiously jabbering about when we needed to have the name of it posthaste. But then I got out my new favorite book on the subject, The Homeowner’s Complete Tree & Shrub Handbook.
I happened to be at a garden center a few weekends ago—just looking, of course—when I spotted several beautiful specimens for sale. It was just my luck that they were in bloom so I could take a whiff of the pretty, white blossoms to be sure it was the same lovely scent I’d experienced at the Flower Factory.
I could barely get near the blooms because they were just plastered with insects. I’d only seen one or two butterflies so far this spring, but there were at least a half-dozen Painted Lady Butterflies fighting for space on the blossoms with numerous bees and ladybugs. I secretly wondered if the garden center had painted something on the shrub to make it such an insect magnet. There were probably people watching me on hidden cameras. “Look at that, Carl, we have another sucker, release more ladybugs!”
Even if it had been a trick, I was far too smitten with the little shrubs to leave the garden center without taking one home. So that’s exactly what I did.