Brand:  Southern Living

Description:

A wonderful compact selection, featuring showy clusters of fragrant, creamy white flowers in late winter to early spring; foliage turns red in winter; very adaptable, makes a great specimen plant, or low hedge; heat tolerant and disease resistant

Ornamental Features

Sugar Cookie™ Sweet Viburnum features showy fragrant creamy white lacecap flowers held atop the branches from late winter to early spring. It has green evergreen foliage which emerges coppery-bronze in spring. The serrated oval leaves turn an outstanding red in the fall, which persists throughout the winter. It produces red berries from late summer to late winter, which fade to black over time.

Landscape Attributes

Sugar Cookie™ Sweet Viburnum is a dense multi-stemmed evergreen shrub with an upright spreading habit of growth. Its average texture blends into the landscape, but can be balanced by one or two finer or coarser trees or shrubs for an effective composition.

This is a relatively low maintenance shrub, and should only be pruned after flowering to avoid removing any of the current season's flowers. It is a good choice for attracting birds and butterflies to your yard, but is not particularly attractive to deer who tend to leave it alone in favor of tastier treats. It has no significant negative characteristics.

Sugar Cookie™ Sweet Viburnum is recommended for the following landscape applications;

• Accent
• Mass Planting
• Hedges/Screening
• Container Planting

Planting & Growing

Sugar Cookie™ Sweet Viburnum will grow to be about 6 feet tall at maturity, with a spread of 6 feet. It has a low canopy with a typical clearance of 1 foot from the ground, and is suitable for planting under power lines. It grows at a medium rate, and under ideal conditions can be expected to live for 40 years or more.

This shrub does best in full sun to partial shade. It is very adaptable to both dry and moist locations, and should do just fine under average home landscape conditions. It is not particular as to soil type or pH. It is highly tolerant of urban pollution and will even thrive in inner city environments. This is a selected variety of a species not originally from North America.

Sugar Cookie™ Sweet Viburnum makes a fine choice for the outdoor landscape, but it is also well-suited for use in outdoor pots and containers. With its upright habit of growth, it is best suited for use as a 'thriller' in the 'spiller-thriller-filler' container combination; plant it near the center of the pot, surrounded by smaller plants and those that spill over the edges. It is even sizeable enough that it can be grown alone in a suitable container. Note that when grown in a container, it may not perform exactly as indicated on the tag - this is to be expected. Also note that when growing plants in outdoor containers and baskets, they may require more frequent waterings than they would in the yard or garden.