Pinus Sylvestris ‘Hillside Creeper’ (Scots Pine mini standard)

A Scots Pine puddle. Everything you know and love about P. sylvestris (we’ll list the qualities momentarily) but melted. Technically ‘prostrate’ but we like melted for its conjuration of things gooey and smothering and delicious. Think of this as foliar custard, richly thick and flowing, all velvety and dense.

A mature specimen won’t rise much beyond a foot and a half or so tall, but the rambling branches thickly coated in voluptuous needles will sprawl and spill over a wide area, pooling into hollows and plunging down a slope or wall in great billowy ripples quite quickly once established. Great for a gravel garden perhaps, grown flat and spreading and where it can lap at the base of boulders and taller coniferous types, or we could suggest planting a few to slosh some delicate evergreen groundcover into a Japanese inspired setting. ‘Hillside Creeper’ has that quite rare attribute in a groundcover in that it remains fine-textured, soft, never out of scale and from a distance sort of ‘mossy’. Just let it flow.

As brilliantly hardy and versatile as its properly lofty parent, this cultivar originated as a seedling in Pennsylvania in the 1970s and growing them here is a doddle. They are happy in any free draining soil, in full sun, and they’re wind resistant.

N.B. When clipping several plants with the same tool, have a bucket containing a 5% bleach solution and swish your blades around for 30 seconds between plants to sterilise them. This will help avoid the chance of cross contamination of disease.

As with all woody plants, plant high, exposing as much of the taper at the base of the trunk as possible. Allowing soil to accumulate round the base of a tree can be fatal. Keep very well-watered when first planted.