Last updated on October 23rd, 2023 at 08:26 pm
With a mixed hedge you can make your garden concept more surprising than with a specific hedge plant variety. You can then combine foliage colors or plant different flowering hedge plants in a jumble to have the most colorful garden hedge possible during the flowering season. With mixed hedges, you also have the option to select hedge plants that have flowering seasons that are strung together. The result is a hedge with a long flowering period. This will give you a lot of pleasure from a flowering hedge between the end of winter and autumn.
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When exactly do hedge plants bloom?
Each hedge plant has its own flowering times. And not only the moment, but also the length of the flowering period can vary from variety to variety. There are hedge plants that bloom only a few weeks, but there are also hedge plants, think here of the butterfly bush and some varieties of hydrangea, which bloom for months. Nevertheless, it can be said that most of our hedge plants in European climate conditions bloom mainly at the end of spring and the beginning of summer. To be more precise, most hedge plants from our assortment bloom between May and July, because the sun shines particularly well then. However, there are exceptions that can benefit your mixed flowering hedge.
That is why we also have many, striking early bloomers in our assortment, which start to bloom in summer and then do not bloom again until autumn is almost over. Winter is then the only season when the flowering hedge cannot express its colorfulness. This is because your hedge plants then need their energy to survive the cold, winter temperatures well. However, with the right plant selection, your mixed flowering hedge will be in bloom by the end of winter.
Early flowering
Because most flowering hedge plants are deciduous, a flowering hedge looks pretty bare in the winter. However, would you like a little more color in your garden as soon as possible? If so, select one or more early flowering hedge plants as part of your mixed hedge. Yellow Dogwood (Cornus mas) and Forsythia ‘Spectabilis’ (Forsythia intermedia ‘Spectabilis’) will even have bare branches that bloom. So even before the leaves sprout in early spring, forsythia flowers are already providing lots of color in the garden. The yellow dogwood blooms a bit more subdued, while forsythia flowers will turn the whole plant or hedge into a bright yellow riot of color.
Laurel snowball (Viburnum tinus) also blooms in winter. Indeed, in December, these evergreen hedge plants already have numerous bright pink buds that open during the winter and form flower clusters with an average of up to 10 cm. Its flower clusters look like snowballs, hence the name of this plant. However, the flowers of blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) also look like snow from a distance. This hedge plant variety blooms a little later than the previously mentioned varieties, namely only between March and April, but still the laurel snowball is an early bloomer, because it usually does not have fresh shoots when it blooms.
Summer bloomers consist of a wide scale.
Our high quality assortment consists of hedge plants that bloom at the end of spring or are summer bloomers. However, because summer sunlight is usually accompanied by warm temperatures, most plants bloom in the summer. Many flowering hedge plants therefore also bloom especially strongly when they can optimally benefit from the sun’s rays at their location. Exactly which summer bloomers you should select now therefore depends primarily on which colors or color combinations you prefer. The butterfly bush (Buddleja davidii) and the rhododendron are both available in different colors and are therefore also particularly versatile and interesting.
Special hedge plants with a long flowering period.
Would you like your hedge to bloom for a long time even in autumn? Even then, the butterfly bush is a good option. All butterfly bushes, in fact, bloom only in July, so rather a little later in the summer, but in return they also bloom late into October. Finger shrub (Potentilla fruticosa) is also a wonderful flowering shrub that continues to bloom into the fall. Finger shrub bloom time usually starts in June, but the reddish flowering finger shrub ‘Red Ace’ blooms as early as early May. So you can expect a butterfly bush and a foxglove shrub to bloom profusely for a long time.
While there are hedge plants that bloom in the fall, many of these fall bloomers tend to have an inconspicuous bloom when they do. This is the case, for example, with the ivy (Hedera). Its small, yellow-green flowers serve as a rich food source for insects, but they are hardly noticeable against an evergreen background. In addition, ivy does not do so well in a mixed flowering hedge because it is a climber, which therefore has a tendency to overgrow other plants.
Tips for a hedge with a long flowering period.
If you want to get a lot of pleasure from a hedge that blooms for a long time, then we also have a few tips for you here. First, the plants should be well matched. For example, blackthorn can’t be combined so well with other hedge plants because it has many, strong shallow roots. For example, you could combine different butterfly bush varieties if you want to see different colored flowers in the summer. A sunny location will then ensure that almost every flowering shrub can produce more flowers. It is also recommended that you remove faded flowers quickly by simply cutting them off; this will make next year’s bloom more vigorous.
You should use sharp, clean hedge clippers for pruning so that the fresh cuts can also heal more quickly. Your plants will then be able to recover more quickly from pruning.