Nursery and Landscape - Plants to Consider for Delaware Landscapes Featured at the Upcoming UDBG Plant Sale

This is continuation of the series on plants to consider for Delaware Landscapes featuring those plants that are being offered at the upcoming UDBG Spring Plant Sale.

Corylopsis spicata. Spike Winterhazel 4-6'. Pleasing year round, winterhazel will enchant in early spring before little else is in bloom. Bare branches glow with clusters of pendent, pale yellow flowers, sweetly scented. As flowers fade, pretty leaves unfurl. A wide-spreading, twiggy shrub with an attractive zig-zag habit of growth. Cut branches early to bring inside and force.

Corylus avellana ‘Contorta'. Harry Lauder’s Walkingstick 8-10'. This filbert is grown for anything but the nuts, but for its contorted shape. The twisted, curled and anything-but-straight branches create a magnificent natural sculpture in the winter landscape.

Cotinus (obovatus × coggygria) ‘Grace’. Smoketree 10-15'. A hybrid between the European and American smoketrees. Leaves emerge in spring a light red, darken throughout the summer, and in fall erupt into a fiery red with orange highlights. Frothy pink panicles are 14 in. high and 12 in. wide. Can be cut back to the ground in late winter and grown as a cut-back shrub.

Cotoneaster adpressus ‘Tom Thumb’. Creeping Cotoneaster 1-2'. The extremely diminutive nature of this plant belies that it is easy to grow. The scale of the foliage provides a unique texture that is available in few plants. Fantastic as a specimen, rock garden or groundcover plant.

For more information go to the online UDBC Spring Plant Sale catalog at http://ag.udel.edu/udbg/events/documents/UDBGCat08.pdf