The promise of spring is everywhere: breezy warmth, leafy buds, blue skies, and sweet birdsong. Already, white snowdrops, purple crocuses, and budding daffodils are emerging from dark, rich, warming soil.

Red berries are everywhere, attractive to look at and most of them edible to birds. I am always on the lookout for happy plants of heavenly bamboo, Nandina domestica. It is an airy shrub with compound leaves, some of them bi-pinnate and some tri-pinnate (pinnate meaning the leaflets come out both side of the petiole).

The red berries each hold one to three seeds.

This female Japanese skimmia plant has so much going for it: dark green evergreen leaves, surrounding female buds, and red berries. Quite a few of these plants are in containers in a front yard. Eye-catching. Next time I go by, I will check that there’s a male plant once in a while to ensure that the red berries will show up again next winter. I will be able to tell it is a male, by its larger flowers (or buds) and no berries!

A cluster of tiny pink flowers on this shrub—laurustinus viburnum, Viburnum tinus—are surrounded once more by simple evergreen leaves. This is a great winter-flowering plant whose pink or white flowers become blue berries.

Finally, this is the earliest rhododendron I know of: Rhododendron sutchuenense, from Sichuan, a province in western China. What a joy: a pink truss of blossoms in February.