I love Viburnum trilobum, the American cranberry bush. Not the serve-at-Thanksgiving type of cranberries, but a lovely, carefree, native shrub that has flat white flowers in May/June, red/purple fall foliage and beautiful red berries in late summer. In my experience the berries don’t persist through the winter because they are eaten by wildlife, but while they’re there they are spectacular. This is a shrub to plant where you can let it grow large because it gets 8 to 12 feet tall and just about as wide. It has a moderate growth rate, and I think that it’s most striking when planted in a mixed-shrub border with late-summer blooming shrubs such as Pee Gee hydrangea and/or Rose of Sharon.
The American cranberry bush planted with butterfly bush and 'Tardiva' hydrangea
