Bright blooms

Flowering shrubs bring much needed colour and scent to the garden in late winter and early spring. Expert Tony Kirkham selects the best

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As we arrive at the end of winter, new life in the garden begins to signal the start of spring, with the plants bursting back to life after a long sleep and rest. We're enticed back out there, mainly to see how our plants have overwintered and fared through potentially unfavourable weather such as rain, cold and snow.

After the autumn colour in the garden, this is my favourite time of the year, and I'm drawn out to visit the various larger gardens to see what I'm missing in my own smaller suburban garden.

As I live in the south of England, two gardens that I regularly visit to see and smell the start of spring are The Savill Garden in Windsor Great Park and Borde Hill in West Sussex, where there is a wealth of seasonal flowering shrubs with high ornamental qualities. Both gardens use the space and the surrounding landscape so well to grow and show off these tantalising gems at their best, providing the shelter that many of these plants require.

A walk through these woodland gardens reveals many spring-flowering shrubs, such as the shrubby honeysuckles Lonicera fragrantissima and L. x purpusii 'Winter Beauty, bearing sweetly scented, creamy white flowers on leafless stems, or the many different cultivars of witch hazels, Hamamelis mollis or H. x intermedia. We are spoilt for choice with these delightful shrubs with their showy coloured spidery-like flowers of yellow, orange or red releasing their scents of sweet citrus into the surrounding air.