Libertia grandiflora - and Winter Flowerers

Re Joe's query: L. grandiflora is certainly not monocarpic - though I guess 18 months non-stop flowering may have exhausted even a Libertia!
 
L. g. tends to get a rather poor press, certainly in the 'superior' bits of the UK gardening world. In my experience, it's one of those plants which, if they find they can grow it, people tend to become sniffy about, whereas those who can't, or who haven't yet, experience feelings of violent lust. Being old and idle, I both grow and love it. I only wish I had the space to let it have its unfettered head - I vividly rememberthe spectacular sight of a long border beside a tennis court in a countryhouse garden in Co. Cork in Southern Ireland which in May and June each year is one continuous dazzling sheet of white.
 
Incidentally, does anyone else have the problem I have with getting L. peregrinans to flower with any seriousness? It grows (and spreads) here with satisfying vigour, but very rarely flowers. Not enough heat?? Which alas is the usual (non-)solution offered for my non-flowering problems. Or might there be a cause I can actually do something about?
 
The star winter flowerers in the short but odd list at the moment here in coastal NW UK (including primulas and passionflowers, ceanothus and crinodendron, hellebores and hedychium) are certainly the correas - the outstanding ones just now being C x mannii, C. 'Marian's Marvel,' C. backhouseana and (thanks, Bill, if you're listening!) C. 'Dawn over Santa Cruz.' Does anyone know, by the way, what the 'optimum' size and growth-habit of this last creature might be? Here it has all the good and bad points of a testerone-driven teenager - leggy and uncontrollably floppetty but also unstoppably energetic and full of pzazz (it has several hundred flowers open at the moment). Can I control it by hard pruning or is that Not A Good Idea?
 
Tim
(in the middle of a minor blizzard out of a clear blue sky! nothing boring about *our* climate...)
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