Beautify your yard with flowering shrubs

The easiest way to beautify a yard is to plant perenial flowers and shrubs. Flowering shrubs are obviously the prettiest to have in a yard.

Nanking Cherry blossoms May 4, 2007 Northeastern Washington State

A great all around shrub to plant is the Nanking Cherry (prunus tomentosus). It is a beautiful flowering shrub that produces prolific amounts of flowers in early May and masses of small edible fruit. They are best planted in a row as a hedge to form a windbreak or a privacy barrier that become a visual knockout when in bloom. After fruiting, the dark green leaves make for an appealing hedge.

The Nanking Cherry is a very hardy shrub that originates from Northern China and they flourish here in northeast Washington State. When mature, they can attain ten feet or so in height. The relative short height and the shrub structure make fruit picking easy, especially for kids. The shrub propagates itself from new shoots and the dropped fruits. We have a myriad of seedlings that come up around the base of the shrubs every spring.

The fruits are dark red in color when ripe and taste just like pie cherries. Traditionally the fruits are used to make pies and jelly. Being the size of the tip of your pinky finger, they are a chore to process. The pit seems large in proportion to the fruit and is difficult to remove without smashing the fruit. We have however persevered and made delicious jelly. We like to just eat them straight off the boughs but the sheer number of fruits produced usually compels us to do something with them.

As wildlife plantings, the early flowering provides nectar for bees and hummingbirds when other plants are barely starting to leaf. Birds sure like the fruits and I assume most animals that are not strictly carnivorous would like them also.

From our experience, the Nanking Cherry like to be watered somewhat frequently or I should say they don’t like drought or swamp conditions. They do best in sunny locations and as mentioned earlier are very hardy.