What makes a good plant?

It s a question I suppose that every gardener asks from time to time. My return to it was prompted by two things. The first a rather despairing look at my very sparse 'shrub border', and my wondering why it did not contain any Abelia grandifloras. No shrub could be easier in our climate. It is more or less evergreen, is almost constantly in flower, and is even said to have smell. What I do have is Abelia chinensis with whitish flowers and very definitely smell, and Abelia Edward Goucher, but no 'grandoflora'. Why?  It could be because I am a plant snob. A. Grandifloras are very common, indeed there are often whole hedges of it. Put more kindly it may be because I am a bit of a collector, attracted to the more out of the way, not so that I can show off, but just because I find them more interesting. I certainly used to be rather obsessional in this respect: once I had got one origanum I needed to search out the remaining fifty five - these figures incidentally just plucked out of the air.  I hope that having reached the trosième age I have become a little less obsessed, but I notice that particularly with roses I search for those that I have never grown before. This last fact reminds me to draw people's attention to a newish French gardening magazine, L'Art des Jardins, one of the best gardening mags that I have ever come across, with in the current edition some very good articles on unknown Normandy roses.

But to return to the original question, might my rejection of abelia grandiflora be because it is in fact an inferior plant to say abelia Edward Goucher, and if so why? This leads me on to the second event to occasion  the question, the appearance in flower of Buddleya Lochinch.  It is the first time that I have grown this plant in France, and I can't actually remember seeing a plant here, while my recollection is that it was common enough in England.  Anyway it looks absolutely stunning, and the reason I think is that all its aspects -  the colour of its flower, the colour of its foliage and indeed stalks, covered as they are with a greyish white pubescence, and the way in which the plants holds itself - combine to make it a perfect whole.  There are many plants that can do some of these things well. This is especially true of roses, where you often get a very beautiful flower but a lousy form. I now steer clear of those that in French are called 'érigé', that is to say those with ramrod like stems with one or two flowers at the end of them. Baroness Rothschild is a very good example, a marvellous rosy pink cabbagy flower on what Peter Beale calls 'an upright, tidy plant', but what I would call rather tired looking sticks, with the 'ample foliage' decimated by blackspot.

On my walk today I admired what I will call the herbaceous elder. It is a stauesque looking thing especially when its large 'umbels' (?) make their first appearance, and later with its fruits.  A good garden plant?  I in fact immediately go on the attack with the strongest poison that I can find if it appears in my garden, the reason being that it is an utter thug. So it may be beautiful but . . .  And what may be rare and exotic with us can be a weed elsewhere.  The agapanthus over which we spend so much time and trouble is I gather considered a weed in Australia and South Africa (from whence I believe it comes); similarly the oleander.

So one way and another it is very difficult deciding what is a good garden plant. Is there in fact an ideal that we should all be looking out for? It is not exactly a new question, but with Buddleya Lochinch I think that I have found the answer.