Fruiting raspberries aren't visual enough for the garden, so I grow plenty of ornamental raspberries instead. All of them have exciting foliage, and this one, Rubus idaeus 'Aureus', is a striking and pretty effective groundcover too. It's a dwarf, and startingly non-thorny. Two feet tall tops, but (you've been warned) rambunctiously wide-spreading via thread-thin stolons. Easy to transplant too, in case you want to give some of yours away: Just yank up some, bare-root and bare-handed, and hand it over. No flowers of note, nor fruit, so it's all about the leaves. And look:



















Chrome yellow, without shame, without apology. Perfect near the mahagony-purple lily-pad leaves of Ligularia 'Brit Marie Crawford'.

Rubus idaeus 'Aureus' is only happy in full sun if it has, as they say, "rich moist soil." But it can still scorch. It's easier and more reliable in part shade, or where it gets morning sun only. It's a great groundcover under large (but open) shrubs and trees, which give it the part shade it needs.

I'll post more on this garden beauty so you can enjoy its performance, as well as its shrubby and tree neighbors, over the season.

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!

My streetside bed of beauty-berry interplanted with Spring bulbs is at its Spring peak.
But silly me, I still hadn't cut the beautyberry down to the ground. The beauty of the white dafs was "static'd" by the endless but thin branches from the interplanted callicarpa.
They get cut own to only an inch or two. Really low: the clump in the center is now dwarfed not just by the daffodils at the upper right the right, but by the clump of muscari to the upper left.
Now all the bulbs are free of callicarpa "static": They're the Spring show, loud and clear.
Even from the other side of the street.