Shrubs may not have the instant glamour of a luscious new perennial or the eye-popping display of spring or summer bulbs, but they are the backbone of a garden, providing structure and volume. For flower arrangers, they play an additional role—that of supplying filler material to bulk out vases and offering useful contrast to the flowers. Sometimes the shrubs are the stars themselves (think lilacs in spring, hydrangeas in high summer). But there’s a whole world of more subtle shrubs, too. Scatter these through your garden, and you can have year-round blooms in myriad guises, as well as interesting foliage for your floral arrangements. Here are six I adore.

Note: These shrubs are all frost-hardy and will tolerate zones 4-9.

Viburnum is a vast and diverse genus of flowering shrubs that come in all shapes, from a few feet tall to twenty, and that flower at various points through the year. Viburnum x bodnantense cultivars (‘Dawn’ and ‘Charles Lamont’ are two of the most popular) flower in the winter, providing delicious almond scented blooms on bare stems which look beautiful as single stems in a bud vase. V. carlesii ‘Aurora’ is a compact shrub with delicious pale pink flowers in spring with the most incredible clove scent, while V. opulus ‘Roseum’ is a flower arranger’s mainstay with delicious lime green to white balls of flower in late spring and glossy bright red berries in autumn. (See also: Flowering Shrubs: 10 Favorite Viburnums.)

In late winter, just as the overwhelming longing for spring reaches a crescendo, Daphne odora ‘Aureomarginata’ bursts forth with her exquisitely pretty pale pink flowers that fill the air around it with an intense clove scent, making it perfect for a path or doorway. One cluster of flowers in a tiny vase will fill a room with fragrance. This evergreen shrub is slow growing and resents being moved so put it in a sunny but sheltered spot.