I remember the 2002 Hillier manual says something about tidying it up each year. Check on timing before doing it.

My experiences with about 15 or so species and hybrid Hebes would tend to say don't do it. I never cut further back than existing green foliage, because branches cut without foliage seldom releaf. I don't grow your plant, however.

Periodic tip pinching to control size/increase density is always better than hacking back into hard wood with Hebe in general. Nice looking plant from the photos, maybe you ought to sacrifice the mother plant and just start off with lots of new plants from rooted cuttings?

Google Books is displaying the Hillier Manual page with this shrub on it: "Prune lightly after flowering". They have it under Hebe, say it may be the most beautiful one.

And that it has a loose habit.

Brown/Kirkham, The Pruning of Trees, Shrubs and Conifers says to deadhead it or it may actually fizzle out.

Brickell/Joyce, Pruning & Training prescribes a mid- to late spring annual cutting back, when growth starts. Hard pruning (above new growth) works but old plants are better replaced than cut way down in an attempt to renovate them.

Sounds similar to the handling of lavender plants.

Presumably you wait until new growth starts so you can see where to cut back to and to avoid additional cold damage occurring after cutting back.

Well they're pretty neglected... I'm going to cut back hard and take cuttings, and see what happens. In the future perhaps I'll attempt a more regular pruning regime if I'm not too lazy. Thanks for the comments.

Seems to me it's more trouble than it's worth. I certainly wouldn't want to sell it, or give it to one of my friends, unless they were informed and up to the challenge and in the right microclimate in this area.
I'll pass and stay tuned. I like to hear about growing things on the edge, but I'm not willing to put out the bucks and time for something that iffy. I've got enough to do as it is.

It is really just a hebe, and a relatively hardy one at that, with a rather lax growth habit and large racemes. It takes pruning as well as any other hebe does. It's my experience that many hebes do become rather leggy over time if left to their own devices and benefit from some regular pruning to encourage a more compact and dense growth habit. I try to combine that with an early spring clean up of any winter damage. How far back I prune depends on appearance as well as how far down the stems the new growth is emerging - often you will get budding as far down as the base of the plant and that's a pretty good indication the plant will take some severe pruning.

Hebes and their relatives are also pretty darn easy to strike from cuttings.

I guess there will be those who consider growing hebes in this climate as an "on the edge" planting situation but there are several species I wouldn't be without for PNW gardens.

I have a feeling H. hulkeana will respond favorably to being cut back hard. I'll report on it. I don't think a once-a-year cutting back or shearing is an unreasonable amount of maintenance for most people. It is one of the hardier Hebes to cold and has persisted in the Seattle area for a long time. I'm not sure what might have happened to it in our 1990 big freeze but December 2008 didn't hurt it at all that I saw. To me ease of propagation is a great reason to continue growing some of the hardier Hebes, especially for a species as fast growing as H. hulkeana.

Hebes vary from quite tender to pretty hardy (in Zone 8), how on the edge planting them is depends on the kind.

Well,......Maybe I will try one of the hardier types. In many years of gardening, I've never had anything to do with them. I guess I've just been seeing the 'bad' ones and consequently avoided them. Thanks for the tips.
Hebe never seems to look like it 'belongs' in our gardens. Any ideas on that? Sub-alpine look? Maybe a new thread.

G. Schenk described them in the Sunset rock gardening book as looking as though forged from the metals of the underworld "by Hephaestus himself".

Hardy in the UK, but it needs a sunny, well-drained, airy position to perform well, as it is susceptible to downy mildew

Here is a link that might be useful: Hebe Society - Hebes H - Hebe hulkeana

I wish the Hebe study at the North Willamette Exp Station had been allowed to continue into this winter. Apparently it just dropped to 8F there in December, much colder than it had been any other winter since the study began. That would have sorted the hardy from the tender. Oh well.

For some of the hardiest species you might look at a few of the whipcord Hebes including H. cupressoides and H. ochraea. Forms of H. albicans are also very hardy, though they need excellent drainage and sun... best in a rock garden where other plants won't outcompete them. There's a good prostrate form you might look for.

If they terminated that study already then it was not done long enough to be of full use, missing the 8F for example was not good - temperatures below 10F occur here often enough for it to matter if a tree, shrub or perennial can take them.

Hebe never seems to look like it 'belongs' in our gardens. Any ideas on that?

I'm not sure I could make that assessment, although I do often consider it when looking at hardy palms, etc :-) In large part I consider hebes to be just another in a long list of the small evergreen shrubs we use so frequently for so many purposes in our gardens - offering features similar to heaths and heathers, lavenders or dwarf boxwood or Japanese hollies. And a good many selections are perfectly hardy in this climate, provided drainage is good. Much of the issues folks experience with hebes is that some of the most popular and floriferous sellers - 'Amy' or 'Alicia Amherst', Tricolor', 'Variegata', etc. - are NOT reliably hardy here and so the entire genus is tarred with the same brush.

FWIW, I have never seen Hebe mckeanii ('Emerald Gem') ever damaged by winter cold and selection of odora (buxifolia), glaucophylla, anomala, albicans and pinguifolia all seem to sail through winters here untouched.

Thanks everybody for the information. This fills in one of many gaps in my garden knowledge. I am going to print it out so I can incorporate a plant or two in my garden armed with this info.
I have been going through a sort of writer's block on designing a new part of my garden and this will really help.
Mike

One of the Hebe species that I think is particularly attractive is H. ochraea 'James Stirling', a selected form that takes on a great orange cast to the cypress tree-like foliage, an interesting texture and form. I can't say that I even notice the flowers, not the reason I grow this one. If you like orange colored foliage, similar to Libbertia peregrinans or Stipa arundinacea, this is one to look for.

In general, the smaller leafed Hebe species tend to be much hardier, and can vary in form from ground covers to small shrubs, and also make great looking bonsai specimens. If you are visiting northern California, there is a relatively good collection of Hebe species at the UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley Botanic Gardens, and it would give you a sense how they can fit in with conifers and alpines very easily. The San Francisco Botanic Garden at Golden Gate Park tends to have more of the tender, larger leafed and showier flowering Hebe species and cultivars, but also gives a good idea why they are so popular here in coastal northern California where they thrive in the fog belt areas, so similar temperature wise to much of New Zealand's coastal areas.

Box only looks as abnormal here as a hebe when it has the condition that makes its leaves look cupped. Likewise 'Convexa' Japanese holly looks like an aberration - which it is.

The high mountains of the southern hemisphere and tropics have many other kinds of plants very much not like what is familiar in the north. Some peaks have such weird and unique plants they can be identified in photographs but which plants are visible.

Now that I'm more awake, let me add Hebe recurva, traversii, topiaria and sutherlandii to the list of hardy ones. I've noticed a problem with H. anomala not holding up to snow loads very well, despite being very hardy.

There's a ~6' tall H. ochraea 'James Stirling' at Heronswood near the house - by far the largest one I've ever seen. Fabulous plant, although usually when I see it in nurseries the tag says it only gets 12-18" tall - ha.

To me the only sense in which Hebes (besides the tender species/cultivars) don't "belong" here is that they are somewhat less drought tolerant than they are often purported to be. On really dry sites most of them I think do need some water to get through the summer looking good.... less so, of course, if the soil is heavily amended.

Ian brings up a good point......many hebes get much larger than one would expect. I'm suprised at a 6' tall ochracea 'James Sterling' - even the Hebe Society lists the height on this at 16" - but it certainly has an ability to get very broad in time. I had to remove the one growing in my old garden simply because it got much too large for the spot it was planted. And I find hebes do not transplant well.

A gardening friend has been growing 'Midsummer Beauty' in the Ravenna area of Seattle for a good 10 years - it is easily a 5' tall shrub and of nearly equal width.

The 2002 Hillier manual says H. ochracea is a dwarf shrub (defined as 1 to 3ft elsewhere in the book) and that it is often called H. armstrongii in gardens. 'James Stirling' is described as a dwarf form - implying it grows less than 1 to 3ft tall - with stouter branches, bright gold foliage and less grace than typical for the species.

On the other hand Metcalf (2006) says there is nothing special about 'James Stirling', it being a quite typical example of the species - which he says when well-grown may be 45 cm tall. That's less than 18".

It was grown as an unnamed hebe in the grounds of the old government buildings in Wellington. When the gardener, James Stirling, was asked its name, he replied that he did not know, whereon the enquirer suggested that it be called 'James Stirling'. The name stuck, and this hebe is now widely grown as 'James Stirling'

If the Heronswood plant is a more vigorous seedling of 'James Stirling' or simply completely misidentified, that would not be the first example of either occurrence.

Metcalf indicates 1.5 or 2 m for 'Midsummer Beauty'. 2 meters is 6.5'.

Here is a link that might be useful: Hebes: A Guide to Species, Hybrids, and Allied Genera from Timber Press