• Shrubs are an important element in a garden, and if you choose the right shrubs, you can create a garden that is neat, low-maintenance and full of color--an interesting and unexpected alternative to the standard flower garden.
  
  Bushes require less care and clean up than many other types of plants--some needing only a yearly pruning and shaping and others merely requiring that you rake the leaves or berries they drop to keep their area neat.
  
  

Bushes With Colorful Berries

• When you think of color in a garden, you probably think of flowers and maybe leaves. But don't forget about berries. There are plenty of attractive shrubs that produce colorful berries, providing glints of brightness against green, or in the winter, as a contrast to an otherwise bleak landscape.
  
  Michael Dirr's "Manual of Woody Landscape Plants" says that many species of viburnum produce bright berries abundantly, many of which persist into the winter. Viburnum bushes are generally quite large and would make good backdrops for smaller shrubs and plants or great accent bushes in a large garden. Other bushes that produce berries include juniper, yew, holly, pyracantha, elderberry, barberry, America bittersweet and bayberry.
  
  

Flowering Shrubs

• There are wonderful shrubs that flower, providing spring or summer color to your garden. Large flowering shrubs include lilac, forsythia, viburnum, elderberry, many rose varieties, Carolina allspice, crape myrtle, Siberian pea shrub and hydrangea. Smaller flowering shrubs include dwarf lilac, dwarf weigela, alpine currant, summersweet and winter jasmine. The witch hazel bush is an interesting flowering shrub that blooms in late winter, before it leafs out, according to Patricia Taylor's "Step-by-Step Low-Maintenance Gardens."
  
  Most large and small flowering shrubs are deciduous, meaning that they lose their leaves in the fall. Some, such as the viburnum and alpine currant, have attractive berries that come after their flowering season.
  
  

Bushes With Great Foliage Color

• Don't forget the many bushes that have colorful fall foliage. These include arrowwood viburnum, blueberry bushes, oak leaf hydrangea, fothergilla, sweetspire and staghorn sumac. When the rest of your garden is readying itself for a winter of rest, shrubs with colorful fall foliage provide stunning beauty.
  
  Some shrubs have brilliantly colored foliage in spring and summer, too. The arctic beauty kiwi has foliage that is cream, pink and green. Purple leaf sandcherry has beautiful burgundy leaves, and the black lace elderberry sports lacy leaves that are dark burgundy to almost black.