Prunus lusitanica

Portugal laurel is the evergreen that quiet, well-run gardens lean on, a dense, glossy, dark-leaved shrub that Hillier's manual once flatly called indispensable. The oval leaves are a deep lustrous green, carried on wine-red petioles and reddish young stems that give the whole plant a warm undertone, and in early summer slender racemes of small, fragrant, creamy-white flowers stand out against the dark foliage before ripening to little cherries that pass from red to near-black.

The species comes from the western edge of Europe, Portugal and Spain, southwestern France, and the Atlantic islands of Macaronesia, and the name lusitanica means of Lusitania, the Roman name for Portugal. In cultivation Portugal laurel earns its keep for a simple reason: the shrub is hardier, more tolerant of chalk and drought, and altogether more refined than the coarser common cherry laurel, and takes the shears beautifully.

That combination makes the plant one of the great hedging and screening evergreens, as happy clipped into a formal wall or a lollipop standard as left to grow into a loose, twenty-foot specimen. The fragrant flowers draw bees in early summer, and birds strip the dark fruits in autumn and sow them about. For year-round structure, a windbreak, a background to brighter planting, or a handsome specimen, few broadleaf evergreens are more useful.

One honest caution comes with the virtues. Like the other cherry laurels, Portugal laurel carries cyanogenic compounds in the leaves and seeds; the foliage is poisonous if eaten and gives off a bitter-almond smell of cyanide when crushed, so keep clippings away from children, pets, and livestock, and never burn them in a closed space. Otherwise the plant is easy, thriving in sun or part shade on almost any well-drained soil through USDA zones 7 to 9, drought-tolerant once established, and forgiving of hard pruning.