More on Maritime Mini Hedges

Gay: Which Corokia did you have in mind? Certainly C. buddleoides is
remarkably resistant to salt here - but it does tend to get big - and
I'm never much of a fan of butchering a plant to keep it to an
unnatural size (I'm waiting for the cries of outraged objection!) -
and if you clipped it, wouldn't you lose most if not all of the
flowers and berries? (Mine here is smothered in thousands of buds at
the moment and is going to be quite a sight by early May.) Or is it
another dwarfer species you're thinking of? If there is one, I'd like
to hear of it!

Taking up Dave Poole's sensible hebe suggestion: maybe they're ALL a
bit neat-looking for the sort of situation I imagine we're (in
imagination!) dealing with but those which do well here and are not
far from the right size and not only stand but respond to clipping are
H. buxifolia and the sadly fairly rarely seen H. elliptica. H.
bollonsoi which I've only recently begun to grow is much showier (with
strange rabbits' ears flower spikes, standing upright but curved) and
stands salt well but may be going to grow too big??

Nothing to do with Med. gardening - anything but, indeed - but, for
the fun of it and skip if you're not in the mood/timescale for
irrelevance:

Yesterday I went with a bunch of a garden historians to one of the
earliest and best surviving 'picturesque' gardens in the north of
England, at The Nunnery, Kirkoswald, Cumbria, made in the late 1770s -
a deep gorge where a stream meets a river, winding paths through steep
fern-infested woodland and hacked out of sandstone cliffs hanging
above tumultuous waterfalls - all guaranteed to get late c18 pulses
racing. It was the sort of day we've been having for a week or more,
moments of sun, moments of snow. In the deepest darkest part of the
gorge, several of the party, tuned to the prevailing notion of the
strange and scary, suddenly had a moment of astonishment-cum-fright.
'Cherry blossom is falling on us. Where is the cherry?' Nope. Not
cherry. Not aliens' wedding confetti, either. You guessed. Snow-flakes
from the start of the next mini-snowstorm drifting down into the
gloomy depths. The creator of this splendid place, one Christopher
Aglionby, who inherited the associated grand house in his early
twenties and was dead by his early 30s, would surely have approved.

Incidentally, a reminder that you can make a very effective garden
without a single flower....

Tim on the Solway, looking at yet another Gotterdammerung sky, a band
of purple above the sea, and then blackblackblack - guess what's
coming our way again....
Tim Longville
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