There’s nothing quite like a flowering shrub. A woody plant that sits quiet most of the time, it bursts into color once a year on a schedule you could just about set your clock to. Planted along a border, under a window, or in the center of a garden, it’s often an integral part of the landscape.

Top Bushes to Plant

There are so many flowering shrubs and bushes available that it can be impossible to choose. And while no one says you have to stick to this list, it’s a very good place to start. These are our top 5 picks for easy flowering shrubs to grow in your landscape:

• Lilac – Absolutely nothing smells quite as lovely as the lilac, and its heady fragrance in the breeze is a sure sign that spring is here and summer is not far behind. The beautiful shrubs can reach over 15 feet (4.5 M.) in height if allowed to, and they will thrive with very little attention. 

• Forsythia – Hardy to USDA zone 4 and one of the very first bursts of color in the spring, these easy flowering shrubs to grow can feel like a real lifesaver at the end of a cold, dark winter. The bright yellow flowers of forsythia bushes appear up and down the length of long, branching stems, making it look like the entire plant (which can reach 10 feet high/3 meters) is aglow.

• Rhododendron – A mainstay of so many landscapes, the rhododendron is a shrub that everyone knows and nearly everyone loves. But that popularity has a lot of sense to it. These evergreen shrubs can burst into bloom every spring in pretty much any color you could dream of, though the classics are purple, white, and pink.

• Bluebeard – A relatively small shrub, topping out at 3-4 feet (.91 to 1.2 m.) in height and spread, bluebeard is a welcome sign in late summer, when it explodes in airy clusters of deep blue flowers that bees and butterflies just love. It’s hardy to USDA zone 5, but in cold areas things can get tricky. A cold snap may cause it to die back to the ground, but never fear. It will sprout right up again in the spring.

• Mountain Laurel – The state flower of Pennsylvania, the mountain laurel can be found all the way from Maine to Florida, where it grows wild in the woods but also look beautiful in landscape plantings with other flowering shrubs and bushes. In late spring and early summer, it produces unmistakable cup-shaped flowers in white, pink, and red.