Design Your Winter Garden With Shrubs – An indispensable element of the winter garden, shrubs provide form, structure, fragrance and colors. A well-planted garden will have a selection of these useful plants, each contributing to the overall scheme. Topiarized evergreens and deciduous shrubs with scented winter flowers should be positioned where their characteristics can be appreciated to the full.

Cornus. The dogwood include some enormous frees, for which you will need a large winter garden, but there are some shrubs, which can be kept small by coppicing them every year. This forces them to put up a number of short stems, about 3m (10ft) high, the best of which are richly colored. The spring coppicing can either involve cutting back every single stem, or just half so that it always has some growth.

Growing Shrubs: Size And Habit – Shrubs differ enormously in size. There are mat-forming plants such as the creeping rhymes, which will grow in a rock garden or between paving stones; there are small upright shrubs such as the lavenders, which can be used as part of a flower border or as low  hedges, perhaps as a framework for a herb garden.