Sustainable Landscaping With Native Plants

Chicago Lustre Viburnum

Earlier this week we posted about our work at Glen Rock Schools, where we planted some great looking shrubbery and other plants to fill in an area around the parking lot there. One of the shrubs we utilized was ‘Chicago Lustre Viburnum’, or Viburnum dentatum ‘Synnesvedt’. It’s a gorgeous deciduous shrub with an appearance that will vary year-round. It maintains a lush green foliage year round and bears black and blue fruits in the fall months, which can help attract and feed songbirds. Along with that, the shrub also has showy white flowers in spring that are also nice to look at, and plentiful.

This viburnum is able to maintain a great appearance year-round due to it being a very tough and rugged shrub. The foliage on this shrub can withstand the brutal heat and droughts without even spotting or scorching. Due to this, it’s a fairly simple to grow plant and is quite adaptable to many different soil types/growing conditions. It’s a very versatile shrub and can be grown in full shade, partial shade. and full sun. It also is very low maintenance and only requires pruning once a year in the spring after it’s finished flowering.

At it’s full size, it will grow to be about 8′ by 8′ and the foliage will dangle 2′ from the ground. This size makes it great as a hedge shrub, and it is quite dense once it’s fully grown. Because of it’s massive size and many flowers, they can look great if you choose to plant multiple viburnums together, or you can choose to compliment these by surrounding them with a few dwarf shrubs that will flower as well. Some ideas include scarlet beauty sweetspire or sapphire surf bluebeard. Anything that produces white, blue, purple, or pink flowers can look nice paired with them. Sweetspires will grow 2′-3′ and the bluebeard shrubs grow 3′-4′.

If you want to view what we chose to do using viburnums at Glen Rock Schools, click here! We hope this post helped you find a shrubbery for your lawn or garden that can be both visually appealing and useful for hedge purposes.