Hebe 'Holliday Hall'

Homegrown, by us. Proudly so. We like this Hebe a lot: a very versatile and handsome evergreen shrub that can grow pretty tall for a Hebe, up to 1.8m over time. A thicker-leaved version of the Narrow-leaved (Imaginative) Hebe parviflora angustifolia

This plants natural proclivity towards dense roundishness and being bulletproof makes it the perfect year-round architectural essential for even the coldest and most exposed of gardens: these things are T.O.U.G.H

‘Holiday Hall’ has a great texture when set against shrubs with teenier, contrasting foliage and holds that kind of shiny green in its leaves that looks fresh all year. It makes tremendous hedging that clips well into neat and well-defined forms if that’s what you like. We do. Softer and more roly-poly shapes are permissible: we’re not monsters, and in fact we love to shape these shrubs into a lovely array of blobs and undulating shapes as well because that’s also what we’re into. Us being us, we are a bit mean about actually clipping the flowers off this shrub in order to keep their shape. It will insist on producing short spikes of white blooms, sometimes tinged with purple, in summer. Leave them on if you must, but plenty of other nice shrubs do nice white flowers that are more interesting (everyone’s seen a Hebe: nobody’s surprised) and we keep these instead for their exemplary form and foliage.

Homegrown, by us. We said that but it bears repeating.