Trees and shrubs for all-season interest

Continuous Color helps you identify appealing woody plant ornamental features. It considers flowers and foliage, fall color and fruiting, attractive bark and evergreen structure for winter.

More than 270 plants are listed, and each entry includes a photograph showing the plant in a garden or natural setting. Line drawings show you the structural qualities of the featured woody plants.

The book also includes gardening information, such as hardiness zone, fruit and flower, habit and foliage, height and width.

You will also learn about spacing, light requirements, type of soil preferred, care tips, and how to use that particular plant in the garden and whether to expect potential problems.

Using small trees and shrubs in your garden:

Crabapple tree in flower

The trend is not to segregate flowers in their own beds, but to plant what's called a "mixed border" in which small flowering trees like ornamental pears or shrubs like rhododendrons join perennials in a planting that can look attractive all season.

This style is practical for today's smaller properties, which don't have enough space for separate beds of shrubs and flowers - yet another reason not to stint on the width of your beds.

Trees and shrubs are a lower maintenance way to add all-season color and texture. If you choose carefully, they can be among your easiest-care plants.

A garden populated with one of this and one of that tends to look jumbled and in need of something to pull it all together.

Garden designers recommend planting all except some of the largest stand-alone or specimen plants in odd-numbered groups of three or five. Depending on the space you have available, this is also a good idea with shrubs.

Choosing woody plants that will thrive

Make sure the moisture, soil and sunlight requirements of your chosen tree or shrub match the conditions in your yard. For example, woody plants that grow best in moist situations will do poorly in dry soil areas if they never get watered.

Consider the mature size and shape of the shrubs or trees you want to plant. If there's a major mistake people make in their gardens, it's that they seem to forget that plants grow! And then they spend all sorts of time pruning (generally that means hacking and mutilating) woody plants like forsythia to try to make them smalle