The answer has been in Australian gardens for more than 200 years: the humble, and often very neglected, hydrangea. Hydrangeas will take all but the most arid and exposed conditions. In the hotter climates they need full shade. In sheltered gardens you can give them full sun. In most Canberra suburbs, a shady bank or veranda, or under tree dapples is perfect. They do need moist soil to give their full glory, but will survive without it. Even better, wallabies and possums don't like the taste.

Hydrangeas were the bath salts of the garden for many decades, remembered from grandma's garden but far more boring than more fashionable flowers. Their survivability didn't enhance their reputation. The lanky, neglected hydrangeas of my childhood were often the only greenery in dank forgotten alleys, or gardens where everything else had died.

Some plants look spectacular blooming gloriously when all around is barren. Hydrangeas either need to be part of an attractive garden landscape, or to be grown in lonesome loveliness in a pot and tended, pruned so they don't get lanky. A potted hydrangea can be magnificent, a mass of pink, blue, white, or green with just enough bright leaves to add the necessary contrast. If you have a shady patio, think "hydrangeas". If you have an exposed area of sun-soaked concrete, do not torture your hydrangeas by attempting to grow them there.

My first hydrangeas were a gift from the gardener down the road. I did not want to grow hydrangeas, but she believed they were just what the bare bank near the house - or shed, as it was back then - needed. She was right. One of the other joys of hydrangeas is that almost 100 per cent of cuttings taken from snappable wood will grow into new plants.

Those hydrangeas have bloomed ever since, or rather, have bloomed through spring, summer and autumn, as hydrangeas die back in winter. There have also been hot, dry years when they weren't watered, and they hardly bloomed at all. But they survived.

They have also stayed pretty much the same colour as they were when they were planted. I was taught that hydrangeas turn pink in alkaline soil and blue in acidic soil - soil acidity allows aluminium to become available to the plants. The soil on that bank is acidic, and quite high in aluminium, but the pink hydrangeas have merely lost a bit of their vivid colour.

Most of the ones we grow are white, the good old-fashioned mop-head type, which I love after scorning all those years. There are now an extraordinary number of other forms, from smaller varieties grown especially for pots and minute courtyards, to lace-head hydrangeas with fairy-like flowerheads of lacy blooms, oak-leafed hydrangeas, hydrangeas in a range of blues, pinks, almost red, white, pale green, white with a purple centre, another that has both blue and white flowers, and hundreds more I have drooled over in garden catalogues.

While hydrangeas keep going even if you neglect them for decades, they need care to look their best. Prune back the oldest stems to grow level, the ones with peeling or patchy bark - they are probably getting a bit too old to bloom - then prune the branches that have flowered back to just above a pair of plump flower buds. You can prune untidy hydrangeas back much further, but only at the cost of flower blooms next spring.

Push your cuttings about 30cm deep into soil or a pot of sand, keep moist and in semi shade, and in spring they should grow leaves, and by the next spring, enough roots to plant out somewhere else.

For the most blooms, feed and water your plants well and pick often - a form of summer pruning that will not only stimulate more flowers, but give you vases full of flowers that even someone as ham-fisted as me can arrange. Just trim a leaf or two and bung them in, and they'll look wonderful. The ends of the stems may even grow roots, to be planted out when, after many weeks, you remember it's time to refresh your flowers. Sturdy, lush, with a tendency not just to survive but propagate themselves inside a vase - that's my kind of flower.