In a column a couple of months back, I wrote about some great plants for shade gardens. One of the plants I mentioned was sweet box, or Sarcococca, a very fragrant evergreen perennial that sometimes has a tendency to spread via runners.

If you’re looking to showcase a single specimen of a plant and don’t want your garden eventually overrun with an army of clones, then take care to do due diligence when conducting a botanical background check on potential purchases.

On the other hand, spreaders can come in handy when you need a lot of something and the thickness of your wallet doesn’t mesh with the grandiosity of your garden design. Putting in a hedge or barrier is a good example of making use of multiple plantings of a single plant. With spreaders, though, you can plug in a smaller number of these plants at wider intervals and let them do the filling in.

Bamboo is an obvious choice when you want to block out the rest of the world. It may just be a grass, but it’s like quack grass on steroids. A sturdy and deep barrier of concrete or metal is advised if you require a boundary across which you don’t want your bamboo to pass. Another choice would be to use clumping varieties of bamboo and allow the clumps to eventually meet. It’s slower, but it may be safer in the long run.

Though the rest of these  shrubs love to send out runners, they’re not quite as aggressive as bamboo and can more easily be held in check by selective pruning and pulling up errant runners.

There’s  Nandina domestica, also called heavenly bamboo or sacred bamboo. Nandina isn’t a bamboo at all, of course, but a member of the Berberidaceae, or barberry, family. If you doubt it, just scrape off some of the outer bark and you should find bright yellow inner bark typical of members of this family.

Introduced more than 200 years ago from Asia as an ornamental, Nandina’s numerous small lance-shaped leaves and narrow, upright shape give it a somewhat bamboo-like appearance but with evergreen foliage that changes color with the seasons.

Nandina is so good at spreading from both seeds and rhizomes that in Florida it’s considered a noxious weed. Obviously, we don’t share Florida’s climate, and it hasn’t risen to such notoriety here.

Another spreader is Sorbaria sorbifolia, or false spirea. It’s a deciduous shrub that gets its nickname from the frothy spires of white blooms it produces in late summer. Like true spirea, or Spireae, it’s also a member of the rose family, believe it or not.

And then there’s Rosa rugosa. If you’ve ever backed into a barberry while weeding then know this: a Rugosa is worse. It must surely have been the inspiration for that wicked wall of thorns Maleficent conjured up around Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

Rosa rugosa will do quite well even if it’s heavily pruned back every year. And I’ve read you can cut false spirea down to the ground from time to time when it gets unruly and it will bounce back with gusto.

Wait a minute. Couldn’t the same be said about Himalayan blackberries? And stinging nettle? And kudzu?

Oh, well. Keep your loppers sharp and keep them handy.