Extreme heather

Once regarded as rather dull, heathers now command respect from Toby for showing a new and forceful edge

- TOBY BUCKLAND

I’VE never been a snobbish gardener. Ask anyone. Well, anyone who matters. But there is a plant that I’ve been irrationally snooty about since the 1990s when the ‘new black’ was low-maintenance gardening.

Heather was top of the shrub list and became so ubiquitous that self-styled fashionable gardeners (count me in) became bored of the neat heather garden ‘look’ and snubbed the plants.

Back then, flowers that burgeoned in the spring, bloomed during summer and went to ground, leaving tawny frost catching stems for winter, always turned my head. So compared to vibrant herbaceous aster or phlomis that ‘did something’, heathers had all the dynamism of a scatter cushion.