Butterfly bushes usually bloom in Summer, at the tips of the new stems they started that Spring. So last year's growth isn't useful at all: After growth starts in the Spring, cut each limb back to the lowest possible pair of new leaves. If you're not horrified over how drastically you've pruned, keep going.
There's a butterfly bush that blooms in Spring too, and so whatever you do for your Summer-blooming butterflies, do the reverse for this one.
It blooms on last year's wood, so don't do any pruning until the bloom is well underway, or even finished. And while Summer butterflies often get huge amounts of Winter die-back, Spring butterflies are so hardy that their wood lives year after year, and they can get bigger and bigger: As big as a lilac, and usually much wider.
But since my philosophy is "Why let anything grow naturally if I could be torturing it instead?", I'm getting out the pruners to take full advantage of my Spring butterfly's oddball talents.
The wood is hardy year-to-year? Fine: Then I'll pick one main branch, stake it up, cut off the lower limbs, and—voila—I've got a small tree, a "standard" as we say.  A "standard" as anything that's trained into a ball-on-a-stick form that wouldn't otherwise grow that way.
The younger branches tend to weep, especially as they bloom? Great! I'll get the trunk high enough so that I can have a (small) weeping tree.
And the bush comes in a form with conspicuously silver leaves, not just the regular fuzzy green ones? That's the one for me.
Here's the progress, then, on my silver-leaved, weeping, standard of Spring-blooming butterfly bush.
I've staked up a center branch to grow as a trunk, but then, in the way of much in any garden, got involved with a million other things for a couple of years. Time to prune and primp and reveal what's what.
How 'bout those lavender blooms in three-foot-long spikes? Every garden needs more fireworks.
With the stray lower branches pruned off, the young standard's trunk and head-growth are showing nicely.
And as the plant ages, the number of branches in the canopy increases nicely, making a fuller, wider, and lower-weeping canopy. That's a deep-purple ninebark bush at the left-front, cut to the ground each Spring. It will get six feet tall by September, which is just how tall I should get the butterfly's trunk so the weeping silver branches will mix nicely with the purple of the ninebark.
That's a blue-leaved rose at the back, which will get big enough to form a darker background to the whole ensemble.
Give me three more years, and this will be stunning.
PS: OK, time to grow up and switch over to the Latin:
Silver-leaved Spring-blooming butterfly bush: Buddleia alternifolia 'Argentea'
Purple-leaved ninebark: Physocarpus opulifolius 'Seward'
Blue-leaved rose: Rosa glauca

One hallmark of plant passion is the hunger for the new—or put another way, the openness to an ever-larger world. Yes, we love what we know, the breadth and depth of it, but at the same time we are eager for the new. It's not a zero-sum game: loving something new doesn't necessarily mean we stop loving something old.
And of course, newness itself is something to love. We love a plant (in part) just because we haven't grown it before. It's desirability after we've been together a year or two? A question indeed.
Sophora davidii in this category for me. I hadn't even heard of it until a couple of years ago. Sophoras—and there aren't many sophoras to start with—are trees, and yet Sophora davidii is a shrub. With comparatively tiny leaves, and a heavy Spring bloom of thousands of small white honeysuckle-like flowers with a just-subtle-enough-to-escape-the-notice-of-the-non-serious-gardeners lavender-blue blush on the outside. A dense habit, and plenty of thorns. Very drought tolerant, very hardy, and in those respects at least, like a cousin of a hardy quince.
Mine is still small enough to keep in a pot until I figure out just where it must be planted.
Meanwhile, here's the much larger, but still adolescent, shrub at Wave Hill, already in full bloom because the climate is a week or two milder there.
It's showy enough for the man-in-the-street to notice. And the dense-to-the-ground habit is always a welcome change from the bare-kneed profile of shrubs like lilacs or roses.
And hey, those flowers!
Surprising enough that, for once, I wish I had a Sherlock Holmesian magnifying glass in the house.
But it's saying something that my sophora is still in a pot. It still hasn't found a home in my garden. This is partly because I'm wary of planting it in one of my "regular" beds, which might be too wet in the Winter. And yet my special good-drainage beds are comparatively few—right around the dining terrace, basically—and there's not room for a bush that will otherwise get as large as any determined azalea. Perhaps the solution is to grow the bush up into a standard. A dense ball of that ferny foliage, four or five feet up on a trunk, frothed in Spring with the unique flowers: It would be a singular as well as small-footprint display. And pleasing all Summer long, when the terrace really gets the use. OK: The first step to a standard is to start staking. To pick the stem that will become the trunk. I'll think of where to plant it, and do that in Spring 2011.

I never met a spice bush I didn't like. Easy to see why: The leaves reek of cinnamon and clove when crushed, so of course deer leave this shrub alone. And the flowers have a unique-in-hardy-plants fruity-banana fragrance. The American versions, and there are several, have small but profuse flowers for some weeks in Spring and into Summer; the unusually-long blooming season is reason enough to grow it right there. And they are all impressively, even scarily, shade-tolerant. More shade-tolerant even than yews, oh yes. And so I even plant spice bushes in Manhattan, in gardens surrounded by skyscrapers and shaded directly overhead by huge trees. So far so good, but then there's a Chinese cousin too. It was crossed with the American to create the pink-flowered beauty you see here, 'Hartlage Wine'. And this one is in one of my Manhattan client gardens, with scarcely any sun. And look how happy it is.
What you can't see is that it's already eight feet tall and only four years old. What a performer!
Yes yes, the flowers are pink. Unashamedly, excitedly, exuberantly. Fine: that's why I have two enormous Pink Borders. Hartlage Wine: come home to papa.

Flowering quince is the just-for-show cousin of the fruiting quince. (Which has very ornamental flowers too—in white, very helpful. But we're talking about its non-edible-fruit ornamental cousin right now.)

Flowering quinces are perhaps an acquired taste, not to mention touch: They are uncompromising thorns that will draw blood without qualm.


(This makes the bush wonderfully deer-proof, though.) But for the profuse flower display right in April, I recommend you screw up your courage and your thorn-awareness, and start planting them.

This is my red-flowering quince, in, appropriately, my Red Gardens. It's supposed to be the reddest variety.






(Quince are a diverse tribe, with flowers in white, peach, yellow, pink, and red So there's a place for one in a garden of any color.)

The flowers erupt up and down the branches in mid-April, clear down to the base of the bush. So quince bushes have, literally, a through-and-through density of display that is, handily, enhanced by branching that's open enough to reveal it. Plus the blooms appear before the leaves, so the flowers don't get hidden by foliage either.

And did I say how hardy they quinces are? Zone 5 is the norm, so everyone from Maine to North Carolina can enjoy them. Shade-tolerant (well, somewhat) too?

With a tightly-planted garden like mine, though, quince's natural urge to sprawl combines with all of those thorns to make A Situation.





It's hard to do Spring clean-up when you're also trying to hold thorny branches out of the way.


Here too, quince comes through: With the counter-intuitive mindset of other horribly-thorny shrubs like roses, pyracantha, and hardy orange, quinces just love, love, to be pruned and trained. The head-to-toe blossom on each branch suggests that an espalier would be really advantageous: You'd have blossom top-to-bottom then. A sheet of bloom!

Quinces can be trained with mathematical and even Asbergerish intensity and regularity, but it's easier (translate: less bloody) just to do an informal fan. I'm going to build a simple frame of rebar and wire to get my red quince vertical as well as two-dimensioned. Then I can weed and garden all around it without adding the additional red of my bloody fingers to the display. I'll post again, of course!

It's a long time in "Spring" before the mainstream "Spring" stuff like rhodies and azaleas get going. It's actually hot out. For Spring when it's chilly and still making up its mind—which is, I'd think, when we all need Spring the most—look farther.
No, farther even than forsythia. Your neighbor has that already anyway.
Corylopsis bloom even earlier than forsythia, with more nuanced flowers followed (as I'll post later), unlike forsythia, by dynamite foliage. (I'll post when this bush's foliage comes out.) And the branching is better than forsythia too: Strong horizontals as well as strong verticals. Corylopsis can be big—ten even fifteen feet wide as well as tall—but unlike forsythia they never come across as just a dump of twigs waiting for the compost heap.But first the flowers:
Here's a mature Corylopsis pauciflora from a client's garden. Click to enlarge it—the details are so satisfying. (There are several other species. It's not important to get worked up about which particular one; pauciflora is hardy and, for a corylopsis, not overly big. So it's a great one to start with. In this regard, then, it's the counterpart of Hamamelis "Arnold Promise": foolproof and glad-to-see you. If you only have one hamamelis, Arnold Promise is a great one to have. Only one corylopsis? Do pauciflora.)
The flowers are in pendant chains, a soft yellow-green instead of the sunglass-inducing chrome yellow of forsythia. They are fragrant too, although it's not a penetrating, traveling, "watch it roll toward you" fragrance like with Daphne mezereum, true. But continuing my theme (I see) of honoring plants that are stylish stalwarts when any garden needs them the most, I say that you should just get out there in the chill and drizzle and bring your nose to your corylopsis. It's working hard (but with joy), so give back a little effort in return.
But why not corylopsis from my own garden? Well, one or two are on the plans—but for areas that are only this year getting transformed from Before (i.e., ignored mess) to After (gardens). And even the small corylopsis ain't small enough. Until, that is, I discovered Corylopsis gotoana 'March Jewel', which gets only eighteen inches high (and yes, five feet across, so it's only dwarf in one dimension). I hope to snag one of those this Fall, unless you beat me to it at Camellia Forest nursery.

Daphnes are essential. Early and fragrant flowers, bone-hardy (as long as they get good drainage), deer aren't interested, quick to mature, and in the cultivar 'Carol Mackie', variegated foliage. Here's my 'Carol Mackie' just coming into leaf...