Think you know hebes? Give these quirky ones that look like conifers a go!
When is a conifer not a conifer? When it’s a hebe, of course! Unusual and strongly reminiscent of conifer foliage, there are several hebe (now officially classed as veronica) species and varieties that have tiny leaves or even scales and conifer-like qualities. These are known as ‘whipcord hebes’.
A handful of these interesting New Zealand natives are readily available to buy in the UK and are rewarding plants when grown well. Many of the whipcord species of hebe are really the preserve of dedicated collectors and are not commercially available, being slow growing, often very small and quite demanding. But there are easier-going and trouble-free examples to make a start with and if you get a taste for them in your garden, you could then seek out some of the rarer forms. If you’re looking for some unusual, but not difficult, evergreens to add to your garden now, with pretty, bee-friendly flowers in early summer, try some whipcord hebes.
Arguably the most readily available and easiest to grow of all whipcord hebes is Hebe ochracea.
We commonly see a more compact variety of it called ‘James Stirling’ in garden centres and nurseries in autumn for planting in winter hanging baskets and windowboxes. Given a place in the garden, however, it will grow steadily into a vase-shaped plant with handsome bronze-coloured foliage and tiny white flowers in summer that are irregularly dispersed around the foliage.
As with all these examples, they are best in full sun, in a free-draining soil. They will likely grow for some time in less ideal conditions, but equally, less impressively than they should. The foliage is a valuable and interesting colour and associates well with fine-leaved and copper-coloured grasses including Anemanthele lessoniana. The species will grow to around 1.2m tall and wide, with ‘James Stirling’ making around 45cm in height.
H. cupressoides ‘Boughton Dome’ is an interesting plant that anyone could mistake for a conifer because it rarely produces much in the way of flowers.
Blue-grey, fine and wiry foliage meshes over time to form a dense mound. It’s sometimes a dome, but often quite irregular and cloud-like in shape. In time it can form all manner of shapes and is typically wider than it is tall. The species can grow to more than 2m tall in time, but ‘Boughton Dome’ is rarely more than 60cm in height. Like all hebes, it will tolerate regular clipping so it can be encouraged into more formal dome shapes
