Shrubs

This Manzanita can be kept clipped to a metre tall, or allowed to become a 2m shrub. Producing pure white lily-of-the-valley flowers during late winter spring. Rarely offered in Australia. Drought tolerant when established and will grow happily in sun or light shade.

I remember a beautifully grown plant of Buddleja alternifolia grown as standard in the walled garden at Cruden Farm. The arching willowy branches were densely foliaged and in full bloom and what pleasure it gave.

These ‘Buzz’™ series are the first truly dwarf Buddlejas to be released on the Australian market. Suited to growing in pots as well as small gardens, it took ten years of dedicated and painstaking breeding work to develop these award winning plants.

A compact growing broom, sometimes sold as C. ‘Volcano’, with rich dark green leaves and dark green vertical stems. During spring and early summer C. ‘Lena’ is smothered with pea shaped flowers, ruby red and yellow. This is a fine small shrub for hot dry positions.

Native to Japan and China Deutzia scabra makes a 2 metre tall shrub clothed in handsome foliage. ‘Candidissima’, grown in western gardens since the 1869s carries large clusters of honey scented double white flowers on arching branches during late spring and early summer.

Makes a magnificent evergreen foliage plant some two metres tall by two thirds as much wide. The large matt green, red edged leaves have a marked white central vein. In late winter showy clusters of reddish brown flowers are produced.

This Hypericum cultivar is a chance seedling that was found in the 1940s in Rowallane Garden, now the headquarters of the National Trust in Northern Ireland.

Pittosporum tobira is a fine coastal plant resistant to salt winds. It is also happy inland and will grow in sun or shade. This new low growing form, Pittosprum tobira ’Wheelers Dwarf’, makes a neat round evergreen shrub to about a metre in height and a little more across.

This tough plant as happy at the seaside as it is in cold inland gardens. Growing to 2 metres tall by near as much across it produces large fragrant yellow pea flowers on 45cm long terminal racemes for many months during late spring and summer.

The flowers of this beautiful form turn pink as they age. Viburnum plicatum is native to China, Japan and Taiwan where it grows by the side of streams. One of the wonders of the late Stuart Rattle's Musk Farm where it thrived.