People don’t give a second thought to decorating their houses. However it is amazing how many people don’t give much thought to decorating their gardens. Making improvements to your yard can add value to your home and enormous amounts of pleasure to your life living there. Using flowering shrubs for landscaping is an excellent way to maximize your money, space, and water in creating a lovely green space for your home.

Summer blooming shrubs and trees should be planted at once. Plan the plantings carefully, for, while the usual emphasis is on the kind of plants to use, the design for the garden is more important and should be carefully thought out and more carefully executed. Southern gardeners, especially, need to realize the importance of the garden plan.

Shrubs are used in four broad ways: for boundaries. for partitions and backgrounds, for specimens and for foundation plantings. We have discussed these uses of shrubs and the characteristics demanded by each use. Even at the risk of repetition, further discussion with the particular plans in mind may be helpful.