Plant space and pruning

Choosing plants to suit a client’s budget, tastes, needs and knowledge is challenging enough without having to anticipate how fast a plant will grow.

Some like to buy in big, which is understandable if you don’t want to wait for your garden to mature. Herbaceous plants (ones that die back at the end of the year and come away again in spring) if bought small, soon bulk up and fill the allotted space. Shrubs and trees take more time. Smaller, younger plants establish more quickly, so need less aftercare and by their fourth or fifth year of planting catch up with the bigger specimens. To begin with, woody plants generally concentrate their growing in the roots. So don’t worry if don’t see much movement above ground in the first, second, or even third year. Remember not to fertilise during this time; it encourages plants with lazy or superficial roots that will find difficult growing period, like drought, challenging. When the roots are properly established, growth will be seen above ground. Then, just when you enjoying grow above ground, your carefully nurtured plant has the annoying habit of outgrowing its space.

So what do you do if you don’t know how a plant will behave?

Good garden centres and nurseries are willing to share their knowledge to those wishing to know more. It is wise not to replace dead plants with more of the same, just in case your recently departed friend had succumb to a disease making, it less tolerant to stressful, wintery conditions.

What do you do if you are an impatient gardener who likes to grow big or you have limited space that needs height but will be quickly outgrown?

Choose plants with fairly dense foliage that won’t sulk or look too patchy after a good prune into hard wood. For example: viburnums, choisya, osmanthus, daphnes, sarcococcas, cotoneaster, hydrangeas, rhododendrons, cornus, berberis, buddleia and mahonias. Most conifers, hebes, ceanothus, arbutus, sage, lavender, are notorious sulkers after a heavy prune and some will never recover unless you only prune their outer green (younger) wood. So when a healthy hebe outgrows it’s space it is best to dig it out, refresh the soil and plant another, small one.

Published in ‘at Home’ a supplement of the Scotland on Sunday on 25 April 2010