When planning your landscape, you may often find there are many plants to choose from. Looking for the perfect flowering shrub with a good fragrance, long flowering, and easy maintenance can be overwhelming. However, once you find that perfect shrub, you may want a companion plant, a green wintertime shrub.

Distylium is one of the easy plants to grow. It is a sun-loving plant that will also handle a little shade. Once established, Distylium doesn’t need to be babied with regular watering. Distylium is not typically bothered by insects or disease and will have evergreen leaves throughout the winter.

Distylium’s natural growth habit is up and out and can be pruned to your liking, but without it, most varieties will take quite some room in your beds. There are several varieties, so finding the right Distylium should be easy. Cinnamon Girl and Jewel Box are the smallest growing, only about three feet tall. Coppertone or Cast in Bronze makes for a great background if four feet is your goal, and if you need an 8-to-10-foot-tall privacy hedge, Linebacker is great! Now, these two stallions do have a flower, a tiny little flower deep inside the plant, and it happens in the wintertime, so most people won’t even see it, but most varieties do have new growth that will contain a little color, like copper or bronze leaves. However, their green leave in the Summer and Winter is their best attribute.

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