For timeless white blooms that come back every year, it’s worth planting a few of the best white-flowering shrubs this month.
If combining this year’s garden trends and Pantone’s Colour of the Year, ‘Cloud Dancer’, sounds good to you, shrubs are a brilliant way to go about it. So many varieties produce stunning clouds of white blooms, delivering a sense of calm to pots, beds and borders.
I’ve rounded up some of the best white-flowering shrubs that you can plant now, as the soil warms up for spring.
What you’ll need
Kent & Stowe
Garden Life Stainless Steel Digging Spade
A sturdy wooden-handled digging spade to help you plant your shrubs.
Vitax
Tree & Shrub Planting Feed
This fertiliser, with added mycorrhizal fungi, can be used to get your shrubs off to a strong start.
Miracle-Gro
Rose and Shrub Fast-Acting Granules Plant Food
Top-rated rose and shrub plant food that you can apply at the first sign of flower buds.
1. White lavender
If purple doesn’t quite fit your garden colour scheme but you want all of the sensory benefits of lavender, it’s worth looking into the white-flowering varieties. Learning how to grow lavender is relatively straightforward, and it’s one of the best scented shrubs, too.
‘For those who love fragrance, Lavender ‘White Summer’ delivers the soothing scent of traditional lavender in pure white tones, making it perfect for sensory gardens, says Julian Palphramand, head of plants at British Garden Centres.
If you’ll be ordering the plants online, Lavandula angustifolia ‘Arctic Snow’ from Crocus produces similar spikes of pure white flowers. I think it’s one of the very best white-flowering shrubs out there.
2. Buddleia ‘Butterfly Candy Little White’
Another shrub that tends to produce purple blooms, buddleia comes in some showstopping white-flowered varieties, too. They don’t call it the butterfly bush for no reason – it’s one of the easiest ways to attract butterflies to your garden.
‘Adding wildlife appeal, Buddleia ‘Butterfly Candy Little White’ offers fragrant white plumes that attract butterflies and bees throughout the summer,’ agrees Julian from British Garden Centres.
You can order Buddleia ‘Butterfly Candy Little White’ plants from Thompson & Morgan. Besides being one of the best white-flowering shrubs that you can plant now, it’s also a dwarf variety, which means it’s a brilliant shrub for pots, too. The flowers give off a subtle honey scent, too.
3. Rose ‘Iceberg’
There are so many white-flowering roses to choose from – you’ve only got to take a look at Crocus’s selection of white roses to get the gist – but there’s one particular variety that Haskins Garden Centres’ in-house plant expert, Alasdair Urquhart, recommends to get the Pantone ‘Cloud Dancer’ look in your garden.
‘Rose ‘Iceberg’ is a reliable choice as it flowers freely over a long period,’ he says. You can order Rose ‘Iceberg’ bare-roots from J. Parker’s.
If you’d prefer to grow a white-flowering climbing rose, you can actually buy Rosa ‘Climbing Iceberg’ from Crocus. It’s a reliable repeat-flowerer if you learn how to deadhead roses properly.
4. Choisya ‘White Dazzler’
Growing up, there was a Mexican orange blossom shrub in my mum’s garden border that produced fragrant flowers every year. The leaves were highly aromatic, too (though not edible!), and as a child, I found myself drawn to that particular part of the garden.
‘Choisya varieties work well, including ‘Greenfingers’, and ‘White Dazzler’,’ suggests Alasdair. ‘These add scented flowers and fresh foliage, making them valuable additions to mixed borders.’
Order Choisya × dewitteana ‘White Dazzler’ in various sizes from Crocus. If you’re working with limited space, the aforementioned Choisya × dewitteana ‘Greenfingers’, which you can also buy from Crocus, is a more compact choice. It’s worth learning how and when to prune Choisya each year to keep it in shape (my mum always kept ours in box-shaped form).
That’s our pick of the best white-flowering shrubs to plant now. They’ll each give your garden a beautiful fragrance during the warmer months.
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