18 Landscaping Bushes to Plant in Your Garden

A bush or shrub is a small plant with no central stem and dense branches. These typically low-maintenance plants do not grow taller than nine feet, but many varieties may grow shorter. Horticulturalists often prune their bushes to maintain a pleasing shape and encourage new growth.

In garden design, home gardeners use small shrubs or bushes as hedging plants for privacy or specimen plants. Some shrubs grow like small trees, while groundcover shrubs are short growers with a wide spread. Bushes can be evergreen or deciduous, and while different varieties do well in different climates, they typically flourish in gardens with full sun or part shade.

When it comes to choosing bushes for landscaping, here are some factors to consider:

1. 1. Aroma: Some gardeners may want scented bushes for their garden. Rose bushes, mock orange, lilac shrubs, and gardenias are excellent for pleasant aromas.
2. 2. Color: Flowering shrubs can provide brilliant color to your garden. To add color to your garden year-round, consider planting azaleas, holly bushes, or forsythia.
3. 3. Edges and borders: Shrubs are great for creating borders and edges to your landscaping. Among the most popular shrubs for borders are arborvitae, boxwoods, forsythias, and lavender shrubs.
4. 4. Privacy: High bushes make for excellent natural fences and barriers to add some privacy to your garden. Some of the best bushes for privacy are dogwoods, lilacs, mock orange shrubs, and arborvitaes.

You can use many types of bushes to landscape your yard, from ones that sprout spring flowers to evergreen shrubs that provide year-round greenery. Here is a list of popular landscaping shrubs and bushes:

1. 1. Azalea shrub: Azaleas are flowering shrubs in the Rhododendron genus of the Ericaceae family. Azaleas originated in the tropical zones in Asia and flourish in the warmer areas of North America. Like most Rhododendron flowers and plants, azaleas are hardy bloomers that come in various flower colors—from pink and orange to white—that appear in the spring. Azaleas are bulbous in shape with leaves pointed outward.
2. 2. Barberry bush: A barberry bush (Berberis vulgaris) is an evergreen shrub that yields red berries and yellow flowers. Barberry bushes are popular foundation planting choices due to their adaptability to many different growing conditions. They make good landscaping plants alongside hydrangeas and boxwoods. Barberry bushes have an upright, columnar growth habit, making them popular doorway frame plants. Japanese barberry (Berberis thunbergii) is one of the most popular barberry bush varieties, but it can become invasive in the northeastern part of the US.
3. 3. Bayberry shrub: Northern bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica) is a deciduous shrub that grows throughout eastern North America. Also known as wax myrtle and candleberry, gardeners love bayberry shrub for its ability to grow fragrant leaves and berries (even in poor soils) that often appear in candles and soaps.
4. 4. Boxwood shrub: Around seventy species of boxwood shrubs comprise the Buxus genus. Boxwoods are evergreen shrubs that gardeners often grow as low hedge plants, though some prefer to prune into trees (which also stimulates new growth). They have small, shiny, oblong-shaped green leaves. Depending on the species and growing conditions, boxwoods can grow anywhere from one foot to thirty feet tall, with a spread of around eight feet. (Most boxwood shrubs that horticulturalists use for landscaping are smaller varieties, growing about two to three feet tall.)
5. 5. Butterfly bush: A butterfly bush (Buddleia Davidii) is a deciduous shrub that grows long, spiked flower trusses in lavender, white, dark purple, or pink. Plant a butterfly bush alongside other host plants like dill, milkweed, and aster to create a butterfly garden that attracts pollinators. However, only adult butterflies can eat the nectar of the butterfly bush.
6. 6. Camellia: The camellia is an evergreen shrub featuring dark green leaves and its pink, red, and white flowers. Camellias bloom in late spring, late summer, or early fall. They thrive in warm air and slightly acidic soil and do best in USDA Hardiness Zones 7 through 10.
7. 7. Euonymus: Euonymus is a genus of plants (commonly called euonymus plants) that includes several varieties of broadleaf evergreen shrubs, deciduous perennials, and fast-growing vines. Most species of euonymus grow horizontally until they mature or find climbing support to grow vertically. Many varieties have multicolored foliage, flowers, or bright fruits that can lend privacy and beauty to your garden.
8. 8. English yew shrub: English yew (Taxus baccata), whose common names include the common yew or European yew, is an evergreen conifer tree endemic to certain parts of Europe, Northern Africa, and Asia. These evergreen perennial trees can grow anywhere from thirty to sixty feet tall, with trunks covered in reddish-brown scaly bark and branches that grow dark green, needle-like leaves. (Shrub varieties rarely grow to around eight feet tall.) English yew produces tiny white flowers (if female) or small yellow flowers (if male).
9. 9. Firebush: Firebush (Hamelia patens) is a large, semi-woody perennial shrub from South Florida and the US tropics. Firebush features flame-colored tubular flowers that attract helpful pollinators like hummingbirds and butterflies. (Hummingbird bush is an alternative name for this specimen.) Its flowers and leaves have a high tolerance for intense heat and sun.
10. 10. Forsythia: Forsythia (Forsythia Vahl) is a cold-hardy flowering shrub in the Oleaceae family, or olive family. This deciduous flowering shrub, nicknamed golden bells, is best known for its bright yellow flowers, which grow along the length of arched branches and bloom in early spring. Some forsythia varieties feature fall foliage in red, green, or purple shades.
11. 11. Holly bush: Holly bushes (Ilex) are deciduous or evergreen shrubs that produce red berries, white flowers, and spiny leaves. Their association with the Christmas holiday has made them popular additions to winter gardens worldwide. You can still enjoy the green leaves and bright red berries of the holly bush. This deer-resistant plant grows best in early spring and late fall.
12. 12. Honeysuckle: Honeysuckle (Lonicera) is a common name for a large family (more than 180 varieties) of drought-tolerant plants known for their sweet smell and delicate, nectar-filled, tubular yellow flowers that attract butterflies, hummingbirds, and bees. Honeysuckle plants have dark green to blue-green leaves and grow as either far-reaching, climbing honeysuckle vines or arching honeysuckle shrubs.
13. 13. Hydrangea: Also commonly called hortensia, hydrangeas make up a genus of more than seventy-five species of flowering shrubs. The name “hydrangea” comes from the Greek word “hydria,” meaning “water vessel.” Although widely grown in the American Southeast, these plants originated in Asia and North America. They can be deciduous or evergreen and grow as climbing vines or trees.
14. 14. Japanese Pieris: Japanese Pieris (Pieris japonica) is a mid-sized evergreen shrub from Japan, China, and Taiwan. This flowering plant—also known by the common names Japanese Andromeda or lily of the valley shrub—blooms early in the growing season with clusters of small, bell-shaped pink or white flowers surrounded by dark green foliage. The Japanese Pieris shrub reaches up to twelve feet with an eight-foot spread, making them popular shrub borders. It thrives in areas with full shade and consistently moist soil amended with mulch.
15. 15. Mock Orange shrub: Mock orange, known by its scientific name Philadelphus coronarius, is a flowering deciduous shrub in the Hydrangeaceae family. The bush has a rounded shape and dark green foliage. Mock orange blooms white, fragrant spring flowers that resemble orange blossoms. These blooms also tend to attract pollinators such as butterflies and bees.
16. 16. Mountain Laurel: Mountain laurel (kalmia latifolia) is a broadleaf evergreen bush that blooms showy, trumpet-shaped red, white, or pink flowers with deep green leaves. Mountain laurel shrubs are part of the Ericaceae family and are also known by the common names calico bush, ivy bush, and spoonwood. They come from Eastern North America like Pennsylvania and Connecticut, Louisiana, Indiana, and the Florida panhandle. Mountain laurel shrubs typically grow up to six feet in height, though two cultivars of dwarf mountain laurel (Elf and Minuet) grow up to three feet in height.
17. 17. Rose of Sharon: The rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus) is a deciduous, green-leafed shrub that blooms hibiscus flowers. Rose of Sharon has numerous branches of foliage shooting out of one main trunk, which gardeners accomplish through systematic pruning. They bloom showy flowers with prominent stamens, typically in blue, white, or pink. Rose of Sharon is native to India and China, but gardeners can propagate it worldwide. Gardeners commonly use the rose of Sharon as a hedging plant, though they will shed their leaves in the winter.
18. 18. Viburnum bush: Viburnum is a flowering shrub within the Adoxaceae plant family that can grow as a deciduous, semi-evergreen, or evergreen plant. Viburnum is a commonly used decorative hedge that visually complements many other different types of plants. Certain cultivars can produce snowball types of flowers, which are rounded and bush-like, or clusters with flat tops, similar to lace-cap hydrangeas.

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