Seven low-maintenance shrubs for year-round beauty

By Natalie Carmolli, for Proven Winners^® ColorChoice^® Shrubs

While spring and summer may be the peak of gardening enjoyment, a thoughtfully designed garden can provide delight in your outdoor spaces all year long. Incorporating shrubs that offer season-long color is the key to creating a landscape that remains vibrant and visually appealing, no matter the time of year. Whether it's the enduring foliage of evergreens, the vivid pop of berries in winter, or the striking architecture of colorful branches, these plants add depth, texture, and interest to your garden throughout all four seasons.

But beauty is only part of the picture. Year-round gardens also support wildlife by providing essential food and shelter while enhancing curb appeal even when other plants lie dormant. The best part? Maintaining this kind of garden doesn’t have to be labor-intensive. There are plenty of low-maintenance shrubs that can effortlessly extend your garden's color palette, keeping it vibrant and inviting through every season.

Evergreens are a natural choice for year-round color, offering reliability and beauty in every season. While their name suggests shades of green, many evergreens go beyond the expected, showcasing foliage in a wide array of colors. These versatile plants provide a steady backdrop for seasonal blooms and stand out on their own, ensuring your garden remains vibrant no matter the time of year.

This is certainly true of SOFT SERVE^® Gold false cypress (Chamaecyparis). Long favored as a low-maintenance alternative to dwarf Alberta spruce, this variety adds an eye-catching twist with its vibrant golden foliage. Hardy in USDA zones 4-8, it thrives in cold winters while providing a radiant backdrop during sunny summers. With a compact size of just 6-10 feet tall and wide, it’s an ideal fit for many residential landscapes.

Another alternative to the green-evergreen is juniper! MONTANA MOSS^® juniper (Juniperus) adds a striking blue-green hue to borders and groundcovers with its low-growing habit of 2-4 feet tall and 3-5 feet wide. Unlike many conventional junipers, it’s surprisingly soft to the touch, a gentle feature that contrasts with its rugged, hardworking nature. This resilient shrub thrives even in the face of deer, drought, salt, and high heat, making it a standout performer in any landscape. USDA zones 5-9.

Looking for a colorful groundcover for shade? PAISLEY PUP^® doghobble (Leucothoe fontanesiana) delivers with style! This North American native forms a spreading mound of pink, white, green, and yellow broadleaf evergreen foliage, creating a vibrant display. In late spring, fragrant white bell-shaped flowers add extra charm. Tough and deer-resistant, it’s a low-maintenance solution for transforming tricky shady spots with a kaleidoscope of color. Hardy in USDA zones 5-8 and grows to 3-4’ wide/4-5’ tall.

CASTLE ROUGE^® blue holly (Ilex meserveae) is a striking male holly that’s anything but blue! Its vibrant red new growth lasts through the season, transitioning to rich burgundy in winter. With an impressive 5-8’ height, it provides plenty of flowers for pollinators and ensures successful pollination for nearby female hollies. Despite its spiky appearance, the foliage is surprisingly soft, making it an excellent choice for pathways, cutting gardens, or hedges near driveways. Like most blue hollies, it thrives in cool climates and performs best in USDA zones 5-7.

Deciduous members of the Ilex family, BERRY HEAVY^® and BERRY HEAVY GOLD^® winterberry hollies bring a healthy green backdrop to summer gardens - and when winter comes, the leaves drop away to reveal bright red and yellow berries, lighting up landscapes and the back of sleeping flowerbeds. With a wide 3-9 hardiness zone, they survive in almost any climate, but their winter display is most striking in cooler zones. Plant one male pollinator Like MR. POPPINS Ilex per every 5-6 females for a berry set. Reaching 6-8 feet at maturity, these hollies make a big, bold statement and bring cheerful color to even the dreariest winter days.

Another way to add bright red and yellow accents to winter gardens is with ARCTIC FIRE^® Red and ARCTIC FIRE^® Yellow Cornus. Both produce tiny white flowers in the springtime, supporting local pollinators first and later on supporting wildlife with little berries. Thankfully they don’t support deer, as neither will often suffer from browsing damage. These selections are much smaller than the typical option, growing half the size of the gigantic red twig dogwoods you see growing in wild areas. Perfect for building up borders, cut flower gardens, or using in drifts to create an impressive display for fall and winter. Hardy in USDA zones 2-7; the red variety will grow to 3-5’ tall/wide, and yellow will reach heights of 4-5’ and widths of 6’.

A final pick for year-round color is a different species of Cornus called SGT PEPPER™. It’s a Tatarian dogwood, so it will have a broad, shrubby habit (4-6’t/6-8’w) that will fill large spaces with end-to-end eye-popping color. A new Proven Winners® ColorChoice® variety, Sgt. Pepper dogwood has extremely eye-catching leaves, no matter what time it is in the growing season. In spring, it emerges pink and green, softens to white and green for summer, and blazes to hot pink margins and deep burgundy centers for fall. Its fluffy white spring flowers and bright red winter stems give it memorable color in the shoulder seasons as well. For four-season color, you can’t go wrong with this showpiece. Hardy in USA zones 3-7.

Year-round color in the garden doesn’t have to be complicated. By choosing shrubs with standout foliage, vibrant berries, or striking winter branches, you can create a landscape that remains lively and captivating in every season. Best of all, many of these shrub choices are easy to maintain, offering you a beautiful garden with less work and more enjoyment throughout the year.

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