The man who dared to plant a shrubbery

OVER the past few decades, there have been regular declarations in the gardening media that shrubs are making a big comeback

- John Hoyland

It hasn’t happened yet. Gardens generally are getting smaller too small for large shrubs and our impatience for quick results is better served by herbaceous perennials and bedding plants.

This state of affairs is compounded by the lack of experience and, worse, a lack of interest in growing shrubs among some garden designers. I know several designers who can name dozens of varieties of kniphofias and hardy geraniums and many forms of miscanthus, but can barely identify a viburnum or an osmanthus. Their focus is on creating plant communities of herbaceous perennials and grasses with an occasional evergreen shrub thrown in to provide ‘a bit of structure’.

Memories of dingy shrubberies, hangovers from Edwardian gardens, usually dominated by overgrown rhododendrons and laurels, often planted as screening and where the plants merge into an amorphous mass, may have blinded us to the beauty of shrubs.

Any flowers that struggled to appear in these places had faded by early summer and the soil the plants grew in was compacted, dry and lifeless. Their only benefit was that shrubberies provided hiding places for children who could sneak into them to make dens and imagine adventures away from the disapproving gaze of grown-ups.