I don’t know about you, but if I’m putting a lot of effort into the care and maintenance of a shrub, let alone the financial investment at the time of purchase, I want a reasonable payoff. This is doubly true when it comes to deciduous shrubs.

It’s bad enough having to watch their leaves drop in the fall. Now  there’s the added insult of having to go out and rake them  all up and then stare at a bunch of bare branches till spring.

It’s easy to forgive a maple or an oak for littering your lawn and then standing proudly naked in the winter time. They exude a kind of majesty that demands respect and offers plenty of assurance you’ll be back in the shade by mid-summer.

A barberry, on the other hand, demands a lot of faith on a gardener’s part that something good will eventually come out of that winter witch’s brew of grayish branches and rapier-sharp thorns.

What keeps many local gardeners from tossing them over a bluff into Admiralty Inlet after backing into one while weeding is their splendid foliage. That and the fact they’re hardy and pretty carefree and don’t need a lot of water once established. They also can take a bit of shade and deer aren’t that interested in them once they mature and are “fully armed.”

When they eventually do leaf out again in spring, Japanese barberries, or Berberis thungergii, can produce some very striking foliage that morphs through a series of different colors as  spring turns into fall.

For example, Rose Glow has purple foliage, but newer leaves start out rosy pink with some splotches of bronze. Orange Rocket starts out with salmon-colored leaves that turn to bright red in the fall, while Aurea has yellow leaves that turn greenish yellow in the fall.

Most barberries reach from three to five feet in height and produce yellow flowers that become  red berries. If the berries remain in the winter, they can soften the appearance of those bare, spiny branches I mentioned earlier.

The berries will also attract birds to your winter garden, which is a big plus for native wildlife as well as for nature lovers.

It does need to be said that since its introduction from Asia in the mid-19th century as an ornamental, barberries have taken pretty well to the climate and terrain in the U.S. In fact, in much of the Northeast, it’s thrived to the point of becoming an invasive pest. I’ve yet to find a patch of barberries that have run amok around here, but we’d do well to keep our eyes peeled just in case. Remember what happened with innocent looking Scotch broom?

If the thought of sparring with prickly branches doesn’t appeal to you, there are many deciduous shrubs that also offer spectacular foliage but without the pain.

One of my favorites is spirea, or Spiraea spp. Not only do they not have thorns, they provide a double whammy of great-looking foliage in green, yellow and orange along with fabulous blooms that range in color from white to pink, red to purple and even blue.

I did mention they don’t have thorns, didn’t I? None at all. I promise.