Nick Bailey explains how you can change your plants’ behaviour
Through nature and nurture some plants can dramatically adapt
I’ve always been fascinated with the way it’s possible to change plants’ behaviour. It’s the essence of gardening really. We hard prune shrubs into cuboid forms and call them hedges. We trick paperwhite daffodils into thinking spring has arrived early by pu ing them through an artificial winter.
But plants are also chameleonlike in their own right. They can adapt and change the way they behave depending on the environment. All of this got me thinking about how we bring these two ideas together as gardeners and some of the exciting effects we can achieve.
Here are a few plants that, through both nature and nurture, can be dramatically changed...
Convolvulus cneorum
This delicious silver-leafed subshrub bears a succession of delicate, white, bindweed-like flowers through summer. Grown in a free-draining soil in a southfacing position in full sun, it will form a compact, rounded shrub. Change it up: Grown in a different way this li le shrub does something quite surprising. Plant it on the edge of a raised bed, on a rockery, in a planter or at the top of a wall and it will become a trailing plant of sorts, reaching down more than 1m (3¼ft).
Hydrangea petiolaris
The climbing hydrangea is great for cloaking walls with a mass of lush foliage and large, foamy, cream flowers. It’s self-clinging so will climb (eventually) without support.
Forget walls! How about this hydrangea as a 40cm (1¼ft) high, dense ground cover planting? Grown on mass, 1m (3¼ft) apart, with stems initially held close to the ground with wire staples, it makes a brilliant longseason ground cover species.
Euonymus fortunei
Left to their own devices, most of the evergreen euonymus form dense, free-standing shrubs between 30cm (1ft) and 3m (10ft), depending on the cultivar. They’re reliable stalwarts with minimal health problems. Change it up: They may be simple shrubs if planted mid-border or in a pot, but plant them at the base of a wall and something else happens. These shrubs quickly
Lobelia ‘Queen Victoria’
Known for its deep burgundy leaves and intense red flowers, this herbaceous perennial lobelia is a useful border plant, delivering strong colour and form from mid to late summer. Change it up: One of the most adaptable plants I know, this amazing lobelia will grow in a normal well-fed border, in a bog garden and extraordinarily as a marginal species submerged in water at the edge of the pond!