let your privet hedge flower

I found some privet, self-planted in a semi-hedge by the tow-path. Some of its leaves had a spatter variegation, virus, mutation or reaction to stress? It's hard to tell. A softwood cutting from the variegated branch might yield good results. Or it might blight my existing hedge.



When I moved into my current house and found a privet hedge out front, I couldn't believe my luck. I saw topiary, year round green, and a corner of my mind whispered stick insect food though to be honest, with cats and cacti I hardly need the responsibility of live insects too, no matter how exciting.

What I didn't see was curds of fluffy white flowers dripping pollen and oozing nectar, fat bees crawling over them and pollen beetle speckles like a sprinkling of black sesame seeds. I didn't even know that Privet bloomed; I had it as some kind of municipal hedge, competently sterile; a living barrier of the tidiest kind, a bare one-up from camouflage nets and astroturf.



But left to its own devices, Privet will do this, So now, every year, I leave the top of Spriggy Stardust, my topiary chameleon, fluffy and floriferous. The scent of the flowers is a little bit generic, like a hay-meadow crossed with a fancy air-freshener, but it pulls in the bees and the hoverflies and the butterflies and the beetles.



Flowers in my topiary. Happy June.