If you have an eye for a good plant ... Try some real eccentrics

Press, 15 May 1987, Page 14

If you have an eye for a good plant ... Try some real eccentrics

Ligustrum is the genus of the privet hedge and so thoroughly has the hedging type entrenched itself that there seems to be no market at all for the other members of this genus, which include several very ornamental shrubs ahd small trees.

If good foliage is your thing you should look out for Ligustrum japonicum “Rotundifolium.” A heavy, brooding sort of shrub, this; black-green and about as cheerful as an old Humphrey Bogart film on a wet night.

The leaves are roundish and leathery, curved in two directions so that they appear to be crammed together on the branches, and although the surface is glossy they appear to have enormous capacity to absorb, rather than reflect, light. Even on a sunny day this is a gloomy sort of shrub. Don’t let this put you oft though. This privet has a sort of stumpy elegance that lifts it out of the ordinary, making it one of those shrubs whose inclusion in a garden may be taken as a prima facie case that the gardener has an eye for good plants. Its growth is painfully slow and so, apparently, are its sales, which may be the reason why it is not available very often. If gardeners don’t recog-

1 DIARY Derrick •Rooney

nise a good thing when it’s offered to them, perhaps they don’t deserve it. The familiar garden varieties of hydrangea are free-flowering shrubs with mop heads crammed with sterile florets, in shades of purple, blue, red or white. They have large leaves and dense, multistemmed, erect growth, and may either be grown in a shrub border and left more or less to their own' devices, or treated almost like hardy perennials and cut back hard in winter.

Light winter pruning of hydrangeas,. just cutting off the dead heads and pruning the stems no further back than the first or second pair of buds from the top, promotes an abundance of early flowerheads that make a great splash of colour. Hard pruning, leaving only a handful of stems on each bush, results in later flowering, but the heads may be massive. Hydrangeas grow well against south or west-fac-ing walls, seeming to enjoy the shelter these pro-

vide, but no-one could call them climbers. Hydrangeas don’t climb, do they. Wrong! Several hydrangeas are true climbers, not shrubs at all. They belong to a subsection of the family known as the Calyptranthe subsection. They do not twine or cling by tendrils like clematis but have aerial roots, on the ivy model, by means of which they cling to their host, be it a wall, fence or tree. There is one species, or there are one and a half or four, depending on your view of taxonomy. From the viewpoint of the gardener, there are four distinct climbing hydrangeas, of which unfortunately only one is available from nurseies, and that one not too often. It is hydrangea petiolaris, from Japan. .

A vigorous plant, it can be relied on to make a couple of metres of growth a year once established.

Some authorities have this plant as a subspecies of the Himalayan H. anomala, which has similar habits, clinging to any available support by adventitious roots.

Hydrangea petiolaris has toothed, dark green leaves and shaggy flower-

heads mostly comprised of smdll, whitish fertile flowers, with only a halfdozen to a dozen per head of the “showy” sterile florets. It is not the most spectacular or colourful of climbers but it is unusual (and attractive In a restrained way) and if you are the sort of gardener who likes, to have a few; eccentric plants; you could do worse than look out for this one.

I have it at the junction of two fences, as a background to camellias and companion to the longflowering Luciae rambler rose, dear old “Alberic Barbier.” Nearby, and preparing to twine among the lot when it gets half a chance, is another vigorous climber, belonging to a different family.

This one is there because it. has (a) pretty flowers, very sweet

scented and (b) my favourite name among climbing plants. It is Wattakaka sinensis. If you can- get past giggling at the name you will find that this is ap unassuming and interesting plant The flowers are light pink with a darker crucifix marking in the eye and are followed by crinkly. paired seed pods, shaped like; stylised goat horns. ' • Wattakaka is of Oriental origin, belongs to the milkweed family, Asclepiadaceae, and is thus probably best considered as a hardy version of those popular pot plants, the hoyas. When cut or broken the plants in this family exude thick, milkcoloured sap which gives the family its common name. Some people react 1 adversely to skin contact with this fluid from some species.