WOODY PLANTS, especially trees, can be pure ecological powerhouses, but most of us don’t have room for an entire forest in our backyards. So on a garden scale, which shrubs in particular really get the job done best?
Dan Wilder, a longtime native plant expert who is director of Applied Ecology for Norcross Wildlife Foundation in Massachusetts, shared some ideas about just that.
Dan urges us to make room for more shrubs in our landscapes to support birds and caterpillars and other animals, while at the same time getting to enjoy their beauty in flower and fruit and even the showy fall color that some of his favorite species boast. In addition to his work at Norcross Wildlife Foundation in Wales, Mass., and its 8,000-acre sanctuary, Dan’s a board member of the Ecological Landscape Alliance and also co-author with Mark Richardson of the book “Native Plants for New England Gardens.” (Above, native steeplebush, Spiraea tomentosa.)
Read along as you listen to the May 5, 2025 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
powerhouse shrubs with dan wilder
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Margaret Roach: Happy spring. I guess it’s finally spring.
Dan Wilder: Yes, it’s finally spring [note: this was recorded April 18]. Things are coming out of the ground. The buds are starting to look green. I’m so excited. It’s been a kind of quiet, slow spring, but now’s a good time.
Margaret: Yes, yes. So as I said in the introduction, woody plants are such strong performers in so many ways ecologically, but some of them are really big. But the shrubs, I think it’s just this untapped… They’re just my favorite plants of all, I guess. And I feel lucky that in the beginning when I started making my garden, I had sort of a natural affinity for them and added lots and lots, which are now even bigger than ever. And they do a lot of work, don’t they?
Dan: Yeah, they definitely do. Your intro set us up perfectly. I am an ecologist by trade, and so I’m constantly looking at what we can do on the landscape to make the landscape more ecologically viable. And when I look at the lists of trees, or look at the lists of plants for birds, for bees, for caterpillars, it’s oak trees, it’s willow trees, it’s cherry trees, it’s all the trees, and they’re so important.
But that might work for me at Norcross, where we’ve got a lot of land to work with. But then when I talk to my neighbor who’s got a half-acre lot and I say, “Hey, go plant like 40 oak trees,” that just not realistic [laughter]. It doesn’t work for a lot of people. And I find that shrubs are kind of, as you mentioned a bit, it’s not that they’re not being used, but I don’t think they’re being used to their full potential.
Most gardens, you get your shrub specimens in what is otherwise a herbaceous garden, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But I think we’re doing that almost because we don’t realize that it could be a shrub garden with some herbaceous plants mixed in as well, and maybe a few trees. And they’re very, very adaptable, and frankly range from as big as a tree to smaller than most herbaceous plants. So they really can do just about anything. It’s really just a lack of what we’ve done with these plants in the past. I think they have a lot more to offer.
Margaret: Yeah, absolutely. And my “garden,” because it’s not like a fancy formal place—Versailles is not, the palace at Versailles it is not—but it’s really an assortment of very, very large shrub borders, just islands, many of them near the edges of the property, that are filled with shrubs, a diversity of shrubs. And I’m telling you, the birds from the beginning and now as the shrubs have matured, they know where the action is, and that’s where they visit. And I’ll get whole flocks of whether it’s cedar waxwings or robins or some other kind of thrush or whatever—everybody knows where the goodies are in those big shrub borders.
And it’s less mowing those areas because they are not turf. They could be turf, they’re adjacent to turf, but I kind of carved them out and planted them with shrubs. So that’s the other thing is they’re not meadows. I didn’t turn my lawn into meadow, but it’s shrub borders. That’s an alternative to what to do with some of our useless lawn. Right?
Dan: Oh, certainly. And I’ve seen your garden. It’s fantastic. I wish I’d had the instincts you did when I was first planning mine. I think I was too busy planting a bunch of non-native perennials and I don’t know, planting burning bush and pruning it into a meatball.
Margaret: [Laughter.] I did some of these things too, Dan, really, trust me.
Dan: I mean, we all have to learn, if anyone gets on their high horse and tells you you’re doing it wrong, it’s like I know I learned through mistakes more effectively than I learned through my successes.
And I think what you really hit the nail kind of nicely there is whether it be the useless lawn or whether it be the Versailles-style garden or anything approaching that, gardens can be a very high-maintenance thing. And for some people that’s what they’re looking for. But I’m a lazy gardener. I like to just walk out and look at the beauty that is my garden and think, “Oh my God, this looks amazing. And I haven’t actually had to do much to accomplish this.” And so I find myself often working with plants that are really the tried-and-true species, ones that tend to spread more vigorously than I think a lot of more delicate gardeners prefer.
And I love working with the woody shrubs because you get them established, and then you just kind of forget about them and enjoy them.
And as you mentioned, the bird interactions: You’ll find birds on your herbaceous plants; it’s not that they’re not playing a role. But bird interactions on shrubs are through the roof. I used to always talk to bird folks, and a lot of people would put a bird feeder out on their lawn and they’d enjoy seeing a few birds, and I would regularly tell them, I said, “You know what? Go put that bird feeder by the shrub border or under the tree, or maybe even just plant a few shrubs around it,” and the amount of bird visitation just goes through the roof. It’s not just the shrub itself that the birds are maybe eating or eating the insects in, but it’s great protective cover. Little birds need that, and so you see so much more because of it.
Margaret: So if we’re going to add shrubs, are there particular ones, whether particular genera or—I mean you and I are both in the Northeast and some of this will have to be adapted by people listening from elsewhere to a sort of parallel species, native to their area, but genus by genus. Are there some real home-run kind of plants that you want to recommend?
Dan: What do we begin definitely mean, and as you mentioned, I’m an East Coaster, so I’ll throw some of my favorite species at folks, but a lot of these are genera that are pretty common across the country and frankly even outside of the country.
So I might say bird cherry, which is often usually more referred to as chokecherry, but I never liked the name. That’s Prunus virginiana [above], a fantastic plant in my region, and if you’re on the West Coast, I’m quite confident there’s a shrubby cherry out your way that would do just as well for you. I’ll back us up a quick moment though and say do what works on your landscape. I might tell you that I really like Bebb’s willow [Salix bebbiana], and if you’ve got a dry site, that’s a terrible choice. It likes wet areas. So find the plants that work well for you.
But the ones that jump out to me immediately are, I love the shrubby cherries. I think they’re really underutilized. For some reason, my local chokecherry has a reputation for being weedy and kind of overly vigorous, and I have never found it to spread nearly as quickly as I wanted it to. I think it’s just kind of got a bad rap.
I’ll throw willows in the mix. I have a soft spot for the upland dry-loving willows. In general, willows tend to like it wet, but there’s some real standouts for the kind of the drier sites. There’s a dwarf prairie willow that I’m absolutely obsessed with these days. That’s a lovely kind of short, slowly colonizing willow that grows well in sandy sites and is just loved by bees and caterpillars and birds and everything else.
Margaret: What species is that one dwarf prairie willow?
Dan: Well, it depends on which taxonomist you feel like arguing with that day.
Margaret: [Laughter.] O.K.
Dan: So when I worked in Native Plant Trust, it was going under the name Salix occidentalis, which I think is probably most accurate. I’ve also seen it listed as Salix humilis variety… oh, I want to say tristis. It’s a variety of humilis, which is the prairie willow, the dwarf prairie willow. But especially with our audience from all over the place, take a look at the willows, and don’t assume that they all like it wet though. If you have a wet area, willows are fantastic. You have lots of choices. Look at some of these dry-loving willows. There’s some really cool ones out there.
Margaret: And they tend to have offerings… Besides being fun to look at, and a lot of them are attractive, but they tend to, some of them, wake up early and do a lot of service early on.
Dan: Definitely.
Margaret: Which is really wonderful to stretch that season of offering resources to insects and so forth.
Dan: As much as it’s important to be feeding insects through the summer through the season, I find oftentimes I make a point of focusing on spring and fall because they’re the easier ones to miss, and I want to make sure not to miss them. And willows are fantastic for that.
I’ll throw blueberries in that mix, too. We tend to think of the berries when we think of blueberries, kind of a summer thing. But the flowers that appear in the spring are essential bee food, including for a lot of really specialized kind of blueberry-loving bees, and then it might not be very ecological in terms of its fall kind of use, although there’s definitely value there, but the fall foliage on it thinking about my garden aesthetic: The blueberry fall foliage rivals a burning bush any day. And then who’s not going to enjoy the berries in the midsummer? I think we need to give blueberries a little more of a look beyond just their berry value, which is very high. The flower from fall foliage is also fantastic.
Margaret: I don’t know that I’ve ever actually eaten a blueberry that I’ve grown, but I have many, many, many blueberry bushes that I’ve had for many, many years [laughter]. Everybody else gets to the fruit, but I don’t cultivate them like a farmer would, or even a food gardener would. They’re kind of tucked in here and there among other shrubs again in some of those shrub borders. And they’re always where the action is. And it could be a chipmunk one day and birds the next day. But the pollinators at the flowering time—and the flowers are just tiny little white; they’re kind of inconspicuous, but you can tell they’re flowering even from a distance of the sound you’ll hear. It’s really busy.
Dan: I absolutely love that. I’m the same way with my serviceberries, a plant of many names—serviceberry, shadbush, Juneberry, shadblow, it’s all the same thing. Amelanchier is the genus. And I have planted and grown so many of these, and I think I’ve maybe eaten a half-dozen berries in all of my time. They’re the absolute first one the birds get, and it’s great. One day I might eat a few more berries, and in the meantime I see all these birds flying around, and I’m very happy to not be eating my berries because of all the other benefits I’m getting from this. I think that’s an underutilized genus, the serviceberry genus. [Above, flowers of A. canadensis.]
Margaret: And they have fall color too, I think. Yes?
Dan: Yeah, amazing. A showier flower in spring then the blueberries, a berry that is arguably just as tasty, and then really amazing fall color. And unlike the blueberries, they don’t need the acidic soil, which really opens up their ability for a lot of urban growers and people who might not have the acidic soil that I’m used to in New England.
Margaret: Right. But boy, some of the blueberries, some of the low-bush blueberries, especially that I’ve grown, I mean, my goodness, the red of that foliage. And the foliage is a thicker texture, so it’s almost glossy. Do you know what I mean? At that time, it’s just, wow.
Dan: Of all the blueberries, I think low-bush is the most underutilized. I treat low-bush in many cases like a filler in between other plants landscape. And you might look at one of my gardens and be like, there is more low-bush blueberry in this garden than anything else, including all the herbaceous plants. It is just, I love the idea of a blueberry barren or a blueberry heathland or a blueberry sort of ecosystem. And I can take clues from those kind wild types that I’ll find out in the natural zone and take that into the garden. All of my highbush blueberries are underplanted with low-bush blueberries. All my serviceberries are underplanted with low-bush blueberries.
Being the nerd that I am I get into how there’s a bunch of different species of both highbush and low-bush blueberries beyond the common ones that we’re most familiar with. So you can really delve into this if you want to. [V. corymbosum in fall color, below.]
Margaret: The genus Vaccinium is a powerhouse for sure. So do some homework on that. Yes, absolutely.
Dan: Hear hear.
Margaret: [Laughter.] So blueberries, we’re definitely voting two very strong positive votes for: thumbs up, thumbs up. Any other genus that you want to shout out?
Dan: Let me throw two at you that I like to think of almost in a herbaceous manner. Those would be our dogwoods and the native spiraeas. And what I mean by that is I will often incorporate those two genera, dogwood and spiraea, into my herbaceous plantings, often into meadow-style plantings. And what I like about those—and I’ll throw willows into this mix, although we’ve already mentioned them—is that you can cut these things right to the ground really at any time you might want, and they will handle that and sprout up from the roots again.
And it makes them very useful in a lot of landscapes where you might want the value of a woody species, but also have the option to manage it in a more cutback perennial manner. It’s particularly useful in meadows, as I mentioned, but also under drip lines on houses where you might get a heavy snow pack that smashes up your shrubs. You still want that kind of structure, but it might get kind of damaged over the winter. And you come by in spring and it looks pretty bedraggled and it’s nice to know it’s like, “O.K., I can just cut this whole darn thing down. It’s going to grow right from that no problem.”
And they also happen to be ecological powerhouses, and I think the one that’s popping into my head is a species called steeplebush. It’s Spiraea tomentosa [photo, top of page] in my region. It’s got these lovely pink kind of spiky flowers that mature into kind of a maroon-burgundy and eventually turn brown and dry and stand on the shrub. I don’t know why this plant isn’t more popular. It grows anywhere from wet to dry. It doesn’t get any taller than about 3-1/2, 4 feet tall. You can cut the thing down if you want to or just leave it up. It’s an ecological powerhouse, and it’s got a flower that is not too dissimilar from something like a lilac. It’s really showy. And every time I go to the nursery, I see a bunch of non-native spiraeas—and no knock against them, but I don’t think any of them have anything to hold on our native spiraea. And they definitely don’t have the ecological value.
Margaret: Right? I looked on the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center website, where they have the plant search. And if you just put in the genus name for the Spiraea, I mean, it’s just interesting to see these native species—and as you say at the garden center, we never see these native species. So that’s another one that’s just kind of an eye-opener to think about that we can add that’s beautiful as well as does a lot of service ecologically.
Dan: Definitely. I think we need more attention to some of these underutilized species. Some of them are a little odd and a little hard to kind of find the right spot for. I’m thinking of some mountaintop willows that I’m really into, but one’s like Spiraea tomentosa or our native gray dogwood [Cornus racemosa] that doesn’t have the same color of the twigs as the red twig dogwoods, but the flower is showier. The berry is more consistent—and it’s never used in the landscape. And I think we need to spend a little more time exploring some of these shrubs. They’re fantastic in the wild, and from the ecological point of view, it doesn’t need to look good to be successful. But I think there’s a lot to be said for garden use of a lot of these species that we might run across in the wild and never see in the nursery.
Margaret: I have a lot of the red twig dogwoods and I really love them, in the winter especially. I mean for me, selfishly, it’s just a joy to look out at them.
Dan: Yeah, that’s something the shrubs offer that the herbaceous don’t is that late season interest, both the fall foliage, but also that winter interest. I mean, the red twig dogwoods are fantastic. Winterberry holly [Ilex verticillata] pops right into my mind. And then things like hydrangeas that give you a really cool dried flower that could kind of hang out all winter long. You don’t tend to think of gardens in the winter quite the same way as we do the other times a year. But there’s some real standouts in the shrub world for the winter landscape,
Margaret: The winterberries [above], I think I might have the national collection of…[laughter]. I have a lot of winterberries now for some reason, and I really have no idea why. I bought maybe enough for four big groups, maybe 10 or 12 shrubs in each group. And this was 30-something years ago. I sited each group, each border, sort of on axis from a key window in the house, so that I imagined looking out at these big scenes of red fruit at a distance. And they’re all at a great distance from the house, and now they’ve become gigantic after all those years of growing.
But the only thing is that there’s all these birds that know my address, and they don’t really want me to see them in winter. They want to eat them in fall. [Laughter.] So once you begin on the map of the birds fall visiting, forget about it. Now one thing is that they also come with yellowish and yellowish-orange fruit, paler-colored fruit, and those fruits will not be eaten as early or as quickly by the birds. So if you want to have a bit of a selfish thing going on where you have one group that you get to stare at longer that lasts into maybe January or February, pick one of the lighter fruits, not the red ones.
Dan: I think you’ve done it perfectly where you’ve got the stuff that the birds really want and you’ve got a good kind of ecological garden going, but then you’ve also got some that you get to enjoy yourself before the birds get to them. And that’s perfect. I think that’s a realistic way of kind of gardening a landscape.
Margaret: And of course I am happy when they come and visit when a whole flock again of waxwings or something comes in and there’s no greater joy. So job done.
Dan: But I do get a little skeptical when I go to the nursery and I see the winterberry that’s advertised as berries that’ll last throughout the entire winter. And I’m like, “Oh, that means the birds don’t want to eat them. What’s going on with this shrub?”
Is that really what I want on my landscape? And then getting kind of realistic. If that is what you want on the landscape, go ahead and plant it. Plant some of the wild types as well, and you get the best of both worlds and you don’t have to feel guilty about it. You get to enjoy and also feed the birds. It’s great to be able to kind of do it all.
Margaret: What about viburnums? Do you use any viburnums?
Dan: Oh, I absolutely love the viburnums. What I always dig about the viburnums is you name the habitat, whether it be sunny, shady, dry, wet, and there is a viburnum species, often a few that grow well in that type of habitat. So instead of telling you, I really like say the nannyberry viburnum [V. lentago] or the maple-leaf viburnum [V. acerifolium, below], what I’ll do when I’m talking to someone to say, what is your landscape? Where are you growing? What are the conditions? And there’s always a viburnum that fits.
I’ve got some Viburnum prunifolium, the blackhaw, that’s growing on a ridge top. It is full sun and dry soils. I’ve got cranberrybush viburnum [V. trilobum] growing in full sun in wet soils. I’ve got maple-leaf viburnum in the full shade, dry soils. I mean, it’s just different species for different sites. It’s amazing how much diversity there is within that genus.
And a lot of the others we’ve been talking about, they’re ecological powerhouses, especially those blue-berried ones. The berries are chock full of carbohydrates, which is something that is really valuable for the birds. They’re eating them in the late fall, that’s when most of them are ripening, and that’s kind of right before the cold season. So getting a really nutritious berry then is really important. So I always tend to favor those.
Margaret: I have quite a number of those as well, and they do have the attractive flowers, and they have their fruit, and many of them have a kind of wine-colored or darker fall foliage, which is great.
I also have a lot of Aronia, the chokeberries. And those have great fall color, and that fruit is ripens very, very, very late. So that’s feeding creatures at a different time. But I like those as well. And those flower; those are popular among the insects when they flower as well. At least they seem to be. So I enjoy those, too. And they’re easy to grow.
Dan: I agree. I’m glad to hear more people talking about the Aronias lately, but they’re another, they’re not as underutilized as some of the others, but definitely are still in that underutilized category. I think you need a name change. Chokeberry is just not a great name. And it’s kind of funny. I was looking in the supermarket the other day, buying juices, and I’m realizing that Ocean Spray incorporates a bunch of chokeberry juice into a lot of their juice mixes—very, very high in antioxidants. They don’t call it chokeberry, they call it Aronia berry. And the genus is Aronia. And when I looked it up, I see all this stuff about how Aronia is a new superfood, and I think it’s getting a bit of a PR campaign that it deserves.
Margaret: Interesting.
Dan: Do you know the black one [melanocarpa] or the red one [arbutifolia]?
Margaret: I have both. A lot of the black one, though. And again, the foliage has great fall color.
Do you quickly want to shout out any more plants? I know you’re a lover of sweetfern, Comptonia, which is an unusual thing. And it’s not a fern, it’s a flowering plant [laughter].
Dan: It’s a shrub, it produces an actual fruit, although it doesn’t really look like a typical one. And it smells like Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I love it on trail edges. It’s a tough plant. I’ll plant it on the edges of my walking paths that every now and then we’ll actually drive an ATV or a UTV over, and we go crushing all the sweetfern and it comes right back from it. But meanwhile, while we’re driving through it, the whole area just smells like cinnamon.
A few others I will quickly throw out your way while we’ve got the moment. So we hear about oaks and the value of oaks. Obviously most oaks are trees. There is such a thing as a shrubby oak. It’s called the scrub oak [Quercus ilicifolia]. It’s a really funky, gnarly, cool species that is worth putting on your maybe list if you’ve never discovered it before.
And there’s a chestnut called the chinquapin chestnut [Castanea pumila], which is native a little bit south of my region, but grows just fine around here. It does get affected by chestnut blight, but not nearly as badly as the American chestnut. And while the blight is slowly killing stems of it, there’s constantly new stems coming up, flowers and fruit forming, some really amazing specialized bee interactions on that shrub, and one that I think could use a little more attention. It’s a new one for me, and I’ve gotten really excited about it lately.
Margaret: Interesting. Yeah. From other areas of the country, I have a lot of ninebark, the Physocarpus.
Dan: Yeah, that’s a good one. Witch hazel we haven’t mentioned yet; one of the deer-proof shrubs out there.
Margaret: The sweetfern is deerproof, too, I think. But the witch hazel definitely.
Dan: And the spiraeas for that matter. And I find that the deer will eat the blueberry berries, but they rarely actually eat the shrub itself, which is quite nice.
Margaret: Oh, that’s good. That’s good.
Dan: While we’re at it, the bird cherry, that chokecherry we talked about, I don’t think I’ve ever seen deer eat that one. I want to check that one with some other folks, but I don’t recall ever seeing deer browsing on that one, either.
Margaret: So basically what we’re advocating is make some shrub borders.
Dan: Yeah. Try more shrubs.
Margaret: Formal or informal, loose or… I mean, they can be a privacy screen, they can be a boundary along the road. They can be an ornamental garden of their own within your property. Use your creativity, yes?. I mean, it can be anything.
Dan: They can be a filler in between your plants. They can be a cutback in some places. I mean, we could even go wild and say, plant some red maple trees and cut them back into shrubs. And we could start getting really broad with this [laughter], but let your imagination guide you. I think there’s a lot more that shrubs can do in the landscape than we tend to think of. Start thinking crazy and have some fun with it.
Margaret: All right. Well, thank you Dan Wilder from Norcross. It’s good to talk to you again. It’s been too long. So thank you for making time today.
Dan: Oh, definitely, Margaret, always a pleasure. Come visit me at Norcross sometime. You’ve got the winterberry garden. I have an American holly grove I need to show you. It’s wild.
(All plant photos by Dan Wilder, used with permission.)
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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 15th year in March 2024. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the May 5, 2025 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
