Native Flowering and Fruiting Perennial Bushes

Perennial bushes have an important place in the homestead gardens and landscape. These bushes help keep water in the soil and provide precious carbon and other elements that improve soil health. They also produce flowers and berries that provide food for pollinators, wildlife, and people. Here’s why you might want to consider sprinkling these flowering and fruiting perennial bushes all over the homestead.

There are many perennial bushes one could chose from that have landscape appeal and that are commonly planted in decorative gardens. Lovely specimens like gardenia, camellia, azalea, and lilac. I love them all!

However, for hardiness and function, I also plant a large number of native flowering and fruiting perennial bushes. These plants have proven themselves to be strong growers, great providers of various products, and can be counted on to not be too fussy on the homestead.

They also provide windbreaks, wildlife shelter, and privacy screens!

Homestead Flowering and Fruiting Perennial Bushes

There are a number of reasons to plant flowering and fruiting perennial bushes on the homestead. One obvious reason is that these plants provide flowers for pollinators, as well as food for humans and wildlife.

In the following sections, I’ll explain why perennial bushes are important to consider when designing your homestead and garden. I’ll also try to answer some common questions when it comes to planting flowering and fruiting bushes.

After that, I have a list of my favorites to share with you.

More Perennial Resources:

Perennial Flowers

5 Perennial Bulbs for Companion Planting

5 Perennial Vegetables to Grow in Pots

Too Much?

If you read through this article and decide you like the idea of mixing up the types of plants you grow in the garden BUT you aren’t quite ready to plant bushes, I suggest you start a little smaller.

We have an article about creating plant guilds (a mix of different kinds of plants, kind of like companion planting) in your vegetable garden. This is a great place to start mixing and matching plants, including perennials and annual vegetable plants!

>>Read the article 7 Steps to Create a Plant Guild in Your Veggie Garden<<<

If you’d like to get a few planning sheets for free, you can access those below.

Why are Perennial Bushes Important in Homestead Design?

Bushes are important in homestead design because they can be integrated in so many ways in the landscape. For example, if you need a privacy screen or a windbreak, but don’t have room for full-sized trees, strong perennial bushes can serve those needs.

Here are some other reasons to use perennial bushes and shrubs in homestead design:

These plants can be integrated into your butterfly and pollinator garden to provide flowers and foliage for pollinators and other beneficial bugs.
Bushes may be planted into guilds, or groups of plants placed together to help support each other’s growth. For example, the Siberian Pea Shrub sequesters beneficial nitrogen on its roots. This nitrogen feed the plants that surround it!
Some bushes put off so much foliage that the leaves that drop in the fall provide a heavy mulch for the plants around it. This suppresses weeds and provides a warm blanket for the plants as winter approaches.
There are native perennial bushes that even have wellness properties and can be planted in the herb garden to create beneficial ecosystems. For example, willow bark (salix alba is commonly used) is used as anti-inflammatory and pain reliever for humans. Willow also contains compounds that promote root development in plant cuttings.

Incorporate Perennial Bushes in Permaculture Design

One of the focuses of Permaculture design is that of including perennial plants in homestead and garden plans as often as possible. There is a place for annuals (especially in the vegetable garden). There’s also a place for bulbs which bloom and fade, only to return the next year.

Perennial root systems are complex highways where beneficial micro-critters congregate.
These systems hold and sequester water deep in the soil.
They also create an anchor for the soil and prevent erosion.
The reliable bloom, fruit, leaf drop cycles of perennials create little ecosystems of their own.
Wildlife return again and again to pollinate, share in the harvest, and nest in their branches.
Because their roots go much deeper, they can access nutrients and water that annuals can’t. This typically makes them very hardy in extreme weather or other challenges.

Other benefits to perennial plants is that they return to their growth cycle quickly in spring because they are already established in the garden. Annual plants spend a lot of their time in spring developing their root systems because they’re brand new every year.

Because they don’t need to be planted every year, the gardener and homesteader don’t need to plant them. Anything that saves me labor and time is something I’m going to be in favor of on the homestead!

Where Can I Plant Flowering and Fruiting Bushes on the Homestead?

It’s important to incorporate perennial flowering and fruiting bushes everywhere you can in your gardens and around the homestead.

They have a decorative place close to the house and can provide much needed shade in hot weather.
A wide array of perennial shrubs, including fruiting bushes, can create a useful perimeter fence. Rugosa roses, for example, have very thorny stems and provide a formidable deterrent to pests and human incursions onto your homestead.
Flowering and fruiting bushes can be planted around the annual vegetable garden to draw pollinators and increase food yields.
Water loving perennial bushes like elder and willow can be planted in low, wet areas of the homestead to soak up extra water. These will still produce berries and useful branches even in wet areas.
Flowering and fruiting bushes should also be included in your orchard. Never plant plant one fruit tree all by itself! Instead, create a group of plants all working together to take care of each other. In permaculture, this is called a guild – something akin to companion planting.

It should be noted that bramble berry bushes like blackberry can be trellised on fences or over archways. They are shrubs only in the technical sense and many will happily grow long across a surface like a fence line.

Grapes, too, are really a vine but they can be grown together alone a fence or an archway, making them versatile in garden design.

What Do I Need to Know About Planting Perennial Bushes?

The first thing to know about planting flowering and fruiting bushes is that most require good drainage. There are some water lovers who don’t mind getting their feet wet like elderberry and willow.

However, usually a soil that is light enough to allow roots to penetrate is great. The soil should also be light enough that it doesn’t compact around the roots of the new plant.

Here are some other tips:

Plan to use wood chips or other kinds of mulch to cover the soil of a newly planted perennial bush. This will keep the soil cool and moist under the bush.
After planting, add some kind of ground cover plant to help the mulch with the important work of keeping the soil insulated and damp. Strawberries are probably my favorite ground cover because they grow so effortlessly.
The berries are a great bonus, but I actually grow strawberries on the ground for their coverage!
Be sure to include some fun annuals around your bush – yes, annuals have their place, too! For example, near my butterfly bush, I usually plant perennial poppies but I also include annual zinnias.
Both produce gorgeous blooms that attract pollinators, but only one survives as a perennial in my climate (the poppies). This isn’t a problem since zinnias grow easily from seed and often reseed themselves from year to year.

Which are the Easiest Perennial Bushes to Grow?

The answer to that question is: the easiest perennial bushes and shrubs to grow are those that are found thriving in your native climate.

Most sates in the U.S. have a Department of Conservation or a university extension that can help you figure out which perennial bushes grow naturally in your area. Local botanical gardens will also feature many native plants and often provide opportunities for further education.

These native plants have developed natural immunity to local plant diseases and pathogens, which makes them relatively care-free to grow. They’ve also adapted to the vagaries of your local climate.

My Favorite Common Native Perennial Bushes in the U.S.

Perennial Fruiting Bushes:

Aronia berries – the berries are small, dark, full of vitamin C and make a delicious if astringent juice. Sweetened with maple syrup, the juice is a sweet reward on a hot day.
Wild Blueberry-type bushes like Huckleberries and June/Saskatoon/Service berries are equally dark and delicious. They make excellent dried fruit or can also be made into juice.
Elderberries are a deliciously healthy berry that have gained popularity in recent years for good reason. They don require some special handling, namely heating, for safe consumption. You can make wellness syrups and even granola bars with these delightful berries!
Goji berries “stack functions” in that they perform the services of providing flowers for pollinators, berries for consumption, and nitrogen fixing on their roots to increase soil fertility.

There are other fruiting bushes that you can consider that aren’t necessarily natives, or that are hybrids improved upon from natives. For example, gooseberries grow natively in the U.S. but Jostaberries don’t! They are a delicious cross between a currant bush and a gooseberry bush.

Flowering & Otherwise Useful Perennial Bushes:

False indigo is a small tree that can be trained as a shrub. It produces lovely flowers which draw pollinators but it also fixes nitrogen into the soil.
Willow has already been mentioned but I can’t say it too many times – I love willow! I have especially soggy soil that I’m trying to rehabilitate and willow is like a wonderful sponge. Willow is quite brittle but there are 1,000 ways to use the sticks in the yard and on the homestead.
Witch Hazel has a rather innocuous bloom but it is such a useful wellness bush that I grow it wherever I can.
Quince bushes and trees are wonderful for pollinators and the fruiting varieties produce a tart, apple-like fruit that can be made into pies, jellies, and dehydrated or freeze dried to produce natural pectin.
Viburnum and all other kinds of snowball bushes have showy, ball-shaped blooms that I simply love. I find their garden grace timeless AND they’ll grow in full to part shade, which is a big bonus. Some have fragrance (like Carlesii) and others have wood that is useful (like Arrowood, which was actually used by native tribes to make arrows).

There are many other perennial bushes of note that you might want to investigate for your homestead. Pea shrubs fix nitrogen and provide feed for livestock and wildlife, for example. Spirea and forsythia provide delightful blooms that herald the advent of spring and provide forage for pollinators.

What’s your favorite perennial bush? I’ve really only covered those that live in the temperate zone – do you live in a tropical zone? Arctic? What grows well where you live?