Small-space gardens: 5 flower and vegetable varieties to plant

Most dwarf or miniature versions of your favorite plants are just as prolific as their full-size counterparts, and some can even be grown in containers. Here are five varieties bred specifically for their small footprints:

Bushel and Berry Baby Cakes

This blackberry produces sweet fruit on tiny, thornless plants well-suited for patio pots. Grow the 3- to 4-foot plants in full sun, where they will produce two crops each season.

Kitchen Minis

These tiny vegetable plants will allow anyone to grow fresh produce practically anywhere. The compact, bushy cherry tomatoes, flavorful sweet or spicy peppers and baby climbing cucumbers will thrive on a sunny patio, balcony and even indoors on a bright windowsill, producing small and tasty harvests for several weeks.

Invincibelle Mini Mauvette Hydrangea

This charming, compact shrub offers small-space gardeners an opportunity to grow an old favorite typically reserved for larger properties. Covered in dense, rounded clusters of rose-mauve flowers from summer through frost, the plant grows just 3 feet tall and wide, and is ideal for sunny to partly sunny gardens.

Butterfly Candy Butterfly Bush

This demure Buddleia produces abundant blooms of white, light pink, hot pink, lavender or purple on plants that grow just 2 to 3 feet tall in full sun. It is low-maintenance and drought-tolerant once established.

Show off Sugar Baby Forsythia

Nothing says spring like a blooming forsythia, and this petite bush delivers the same bursts of sunny color as the original but in a 2½-foot mounding shrub. Deer-resistant and sun-loving with upward-facing branches, it can even be grown in containers.  

— Jessica Damiano