Not a particularly tropical looking shrub but it does provide useful colour in late autumn and often well into winter once most, more exotic, exotics have died back. The colour comes in the way of berries. Large, heavily packed clusters of violet bead like berries are produced in early autumn and if given a sheltered spot can remain along the stems well into January and sometimes even later.

Not only do you get the colourful berries in the autumn but the fall leaf colours are also quite stunning. As the foliage dies back for it’s winter rest period the leaves take on some fantastic shades of gold through to rosy pink. The new growth in spring starts off a bronzy purple colour turning green as they age and the 5 to 12cm long leaves are lanceolate.

Fully hardy, happy in any well drained soil and requiring part shade to full sun with minimum other fuss making it a very easy shrub to grow. It is not particularly vigorous but can eventually reach a height of 4 meters and spread of 2.5 meters. If you wish to keep it smaller you will need to prune every few years. The problem with this is that pruning should be done after flowering which means that on the years you prune you will lose much, if not all of the berries in the autumn depending on how hard you prune.

Sent as a young plant in a 9cm pot.

Photo By Kurt Stüber [1] - caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/mavica/index.html part of www.biolib.de, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2700