Garden Centre

Friday, May 22, 2009

Weigela: another shrub some people love to hate

I’m very fond of the candyfloss pink form of the Weigela and quite a few butterflies seem to like it too. A few years ago, you could find Weigela in garden centres here, there and everywhere for a couple of quid and people planted them with wild abandon, loving their fast growth rate and, of course, the huge stems of white, pale-pink or magenta flower trumpets.

And then they realised the downside: Weigela is what is charmingly called a ‘lax’ grower, which always makes me think that it’s got rather slutty habits, like pushing the dust under the furniture instead of getting the vacuum cleaner out. What lax actually means is that the Weigela will throw out a couple of dozen long springy stems, and then decide it can’t be bothered after all, and let them fall to the ground in rather pretty bending arches, with then absolutely smother themselves in flowers. And that’s all great, until the blossom falls in a rather messy brown pile, and you’re left with eight foot stems of rather uninteresting branches that bend every which way and seem to try and trip you up.

The answer is heavy pruning every year. This keeps your Weigela lush and dramatic but also pins it back in its corner for the rest of the year so you can get round the garden. And then you get the best of all possible worlds. What could be better than that?

My Weigela is underplanted with variegated ivy, which echoes the dappled colours of the flowers rather well, I think.

Labels: variegated ivy, weigela

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:31 AM

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