Viburnum obovatum 'Mrs. Schiller's Delight'

'Mrs. Schiller's Delight' is an excellent dwarf clone of Viburnum obovatum, the fine small-leaved native evergreen known as Walter's viburnum. The clone was selected by our friend Steve Reifler in Florida, who thought the dense little shrub looked like 'Schillings', the widely grown dwarf yaupon holly, and named the plant for a friend whose name happened to sound almost the same. Woodlanders listed this shrub for years as 'Miss Schiller's Delight'; the trade name is 'Mrs.', and the spelling is corrected here.

Woodlanders was one of the first nurseries anywhere to offer the Reifler dwarf clones of Viburnum obovatum, which have since become staples of Southern landscaping and are now grown by the container-load in Florida. 'Mrs. Schiller's Delight' has stayed the most floriferous of the group, and remains the one we would plant ourselves.

Small, narrow, glossy leaves are held in opposite pairs on stiff twiggy branches, and that arrangement is what makes the shrub so remarkably dense. In the Deep South the foliage stays evergreen; toward the colder edge of zone 7 expect semi-evergreen behavior and some winter leaf drop. Then for two or three weeks in late February and early March the whole plant disappears under clusters of small white flowers, well ahead of almost anything else in the garden. Nurseries commonly quote three feet by four feet, and University of Georgia trial plants managed only fourteen inches by three feet in three years, but given enough time and decent soil the shrub can double the usual figure, so allow more room than the label suggests.

Walter's viburnum is a larval host for the spring azure butterfly, and those late-winter flowers are among the first substantial nectar sources of the year for bees and small pollinators, which matters more than the bloom count suggests. Plant in sun or part shade, with full sun producing the densest and most compact growth. Once established, 'Mrs. Schiller's Delight' has proven exceptionally drought tolerant, which makes the shrub useful as a low evergreen hedge, as a foundation planting that will never reach a window, as a clipped or unclipped mass, and as a native substitute wherever dwarf yaupon or boxwood would otherwise go.