Mix & Match

With a huge variety of attractive foliage and bee-friendly flowers, there’s a hebe for every garden

Go to any garden centre and you’re almost guaranteed to find at least one hebe on o er. These shrubs are a staple of the nursery trade and sell in huge volumes, yet are rarely celebrated. Is it because they are so familiar we take them for granted? Perhaps it’s because quite a few of the hebes lined up on the garden centre’s benches are, shall we say, ‘tricky’ to integrate – a shrub with lurid pink leaves will inevitably divide opinion!

But it would be a mistake to tar all hebes with the same brush. This is a diverse genus that includes those familiar garden centre shrubs as well as distinctive species not easily identifiable as hebes. There’s even a dedicated Hebe Society, championing their finer attributes to the wider world. You may recall the Society’s exhibit at the Hampton Court flower show in 2019, which showcased all the fascinating diversity hebes have to o er. Their website, hebesoc.org, is a mine of information too.

Many hebes hail from New Zealand, where they grow on both North and South Islands. In 1880, New Zealand botanist Joseph Armstrong published a catalogue of his homeland’s native plants and described several hebes, although others had been discovered and named as early as the 1830s. Joseph Hooker also recorded the hebes he found on the islands during the 1839 Ross expedition. Hooker was just 23 and filled a six-volume epic, Flora Antarctica, with his findings during the voyage.

Quite often the same hebe would be named by a di erent botanist or plant hunter, leading to much confusion over species and precisely which similar-looking hebe is which. It’s a problem that plant taxonomists are still trying to get to grips with – synonyms abound, and some hebes have been moved into Parahebe. Still, there are some distinctive groups that help make sense of the genus, such as the whipcord hebes – those with scale-like leaves that give the plants the look of a conifer. Hebes with large leaves and showy flowers are often the most tender; small-leaved hebes with white flowers tend to be the most hardy. ■

HOW TO GROW Between 30cm and 1.2m tall, hebes are great for small gardens. Most are compact and don’t need pruning. They like warm, sunny spots and well-drained soil; most will turn up their toes in heavy soil that gets waterlogged. Some varieties need protection from frost.