BY ISAAC OLSON, NURSERY NEAR ME
Ask a South East Queensland gardener what they want from a plant and the answer is nearly always the same: something between me and the neighbours, and something that will not die in January.
A year of our own orders from across the State says the same thing. Hedging and screening plants outsold every other kind, and the single most planted plant was a lily pilly.
That is no accident. The dwarf and medium lily pillies take our humidity, clip into a neat wall, and put on a flush of pink new growth after every trim.
Plant them 60 to 80 centimetres apart for a hedge to head height, or a metre apart for a taller screen, and they close the gap in two summers.
Murraya is the other local workhorse. It flowers with the scent of orange blossom after rain, holds its leaves in a dry spell and takes a hard prune.
Where you want height without width, the clumping bamboos and the narrow lilly pilly forms give a screen a metre wide and four metres tall.
For a looser, bird-friendly boundary, mix grevilleas and bottlebrush and let them grow out rather than clipping them.
Timing matters more than most people think. A hedge planted now has eight or nine weeks to send roots down before the real heat arrives.
The same plants put in just before Christmas spend their first month fighting for water instead of growing.
Author Isaac Olson is a director of Nursery Near Me, an Australian online nursery that delivers to Ipswich, Logan and the Redlands, at nurserynearme.com.au.
