Pining for some architectural chic in your garden? Try a tiny conifer

A garden centre manager once tried to tell me conifers were having a bit of a moment. It was the wrong side of Christmas and I clocked it as a valiant attempt to drum up sales. But then I started to see conifers popping up everywhere.

A well-placed pine looks chic next to a modernist building. Many keep pleasing shapes with little or no pruning, so function architecturally, much like a box ball but without the worry about box tree caterpillars. Once established, they are often drought-tolerant and thrive in poor, stony soils.

The simplest definition of a conifer is a tree with cones. There are about 800 or so worldwide, but there are also thousands of cultivars, many dwarf or miniature. Miniatures will rarely outgrow their situation and often don’t reach more than 60cm or so. They are best suited to troughs and pots or alpine, scree, balcony or courtyard gardens. Dwarfs grow bigger: after 10 years they can reach 2.5 metres, and are best in large containers, borders and landscape schemes.

Cultivars range from neat round buns to strange contorted sorts in colours from acid yellow to deep sea-green blue.

Conifer-only displays can look a little municipal; it’s better to blend small specimens into herbaceous planting, marrying the rusty tones of the bark with other copper tones. Try the more muted orange geums, such as ‘Mai Tai’, the strawberry blondes of summer grasses, perhaps with some dark orange iris, such as ‘Kent Pride’ with a sprinkling of calendula ‘Sunset Buff’. Or try using the deep, dark green of many of the needles to highlight something in front – ferns such as Dryopteris wallichiana or the brilliant flowers of Melica altissima ‘Alba’.

There are hundreds of cultivars: even the mighty Lawson Cypress has ones that won’t grow much past a metre. Perhaps the easiest to start with are dwarf forms of mountain pine, Pinus mugo, such as ‘Gnom’ ‘Picobello’ (best for containers) or ‘Mughus’. The black pine, Pinus nigra – ‘Moseri’, ‘Nana’ or ‘Komet’ – works well in borders.

If space is truly at a premium, try the tiny white Pinus strobus ‘Minima’, which only grows to 50cm in 10 years. Its soft mounds are lime-green when young, but turn blue-green with age. It’s as happy in a pot as in the ground. One of the best places to get them is Larch Cottage Nursery.

Dwarf and miniature conifers grow slowly and this is reflected in their price: expect to pay from £30 for a young specimen. They nearly all do best in free-draining soil; some prefer acid soils so, if planting in pots, use ericaceous peat-free compost. Yellow forms do best in full sun; blue foliage prefers partial shade.