Yellow Provides a Focal Point

Yellow plants can provide contrast to your landscape. There are lots of bushes and shrubs to choose from that can provide interest all year long.

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Transcript:
Yellow Provides a Focal Point

Yellow might be an interesting color to add to your landscape. It’s one that the eye can easily pick up, and so that can be a focal point or just be part of our landscape. We have several plants here that can fill that yellow urge that you may have.

One plant I’d like to point out is our shrub of the year, which is the Tiger Eye Sumac. This is your common sumac that you find across the Kansas’ landscape, but this one has a very interesting shade or tone from it’s leaf. The compound leaf has that bright yellow foliage all summer long. And like all sumacs, it will turn a bronzy red in the fall. This shrub is fairly large. It will get up to six to seven feet tall and wide. From experience, it does sucker like our sumac. It doesn’t sucker as much as our native one, but you will have some baby plants popping up over time to fill in your landscape.

Another one that has a yellow bloom during the spring time is Kerria. It adds a nice texture with nice green stems. One of it’s aspects is that it does have a green stem throughout the growing season in winter. So once this deciduous plant loses it’s leaves, you still have nice, bright, shiny green stems for the winter interest.

This shrub isn’t very large – perhaps maybe 3 to 5 feet tall and wide. Another benefit of this plant is that it tolerates some shade. So it will be a blooming plant that tolerates a shady location.

An evergreen plant that we have is this sea of gold Juniper. This gives up that year-round color and texture. And it gives us some interest when the deciduous plants have dropped their leaves. This plant will get 3-4 feet tall and wide over time, and so this will be another aspect to have in your landscape.

It’s nice to have combinations of these plant materials for different interest during the growing season.

Another plant that we can use for that yellow texture and color in the landscape is the Golden Spirit Smoke Bush. The name says bush, but it will grow 10 feet tall and ten feet wide over time. This has a very nice texture and color to it. As it blooms, you’ll get that smoke feel when the flower blooms come up and give you another added interest.

This feature story prepared with Gregg Eyestone, Kansas State University Research and Extension Horticulture Agent, Riley County. For more information, visit your local county extension office or visit our website at KansasGreenYards.org.