Dwarf Flowering Almond
Ready for spring blooms bursting with color? I know I am! This is the featured plant of the week- Dwarf Flowering Almond (Prunus glandulosa). This beautiful flowering shrub is one of the unsung heroes and a great way to add color to your landscape. The showy bright pink blooms in Spring are always a welcome sight after the gloomy days of Winter. This shrub is one of the first things to bloom each Spring, along with Forsythia. Dug these from the “Grow Beds” this week to pot up for Spring sales and they look great, tiny buds already starting to show ready to spring.
The Pink Flowering Almond is a small shrub that blooms in early Spring with bright double, light pink flowers which appear before the leaves. It grows best in light shade to full sun and requires very little maintenance other than you may choose to do some light pruning after flowers fade. This shrub prefers a well-drained garden soil but has proven to be adaptable to most soil types and moisture levels, even drought.
Dwarf Flowering Almond can be planted as a single foundation plant, in containers or as a mass planting in front of a large shrub bed. In Arkansas, we usually see the flowers bursting in late March or early April.
Some handy facts on the Dwarf Flowering Almond:
- Size 3 ft tall by 4 ft wide
- Form: rounded
- Hardy in zones 4-9
- Tolerates minor drought
- Plant in mass, as a single foundation plant, patio or container
- Annual Growth Rate: 12 to 18 inches
- No serious disease or insect problems.
This is a shrub often found in older gardens and mentioned in Harriet Keeler’s book from 1925 where she notes it “was the gem of our grandfather’s garden”. This beautiful flowering shrub has been in the American landscape at least since the days of Thomas Jefferson as one of the many flowering shrubs planted at Monticello. In 1794, Thomas Jefferson made note of “dble blossd almond” in a list of “objects for the garden this year.”
We will have gallon size Dwarf Flowering Almond available in limited quantity for $5.97. Don’t wait to get yours for your landscape. Come see me!
Flowering Almond with early leaves