Tea Tree and Leptospermum

Tea tree, sold botanically as Leptospermum, is the quick one among the native shrubs. A banksia takes its time and a clipped conifer must be held at size from year one, but Leptospermum knits into a dense, fine-textured screen inside two or three seasons and then carries a few weeks of heavy flower each spring. That pace is the reason to buy it: a boundary that is bare now, an exposed or coastal block needing a windbreak against salt wind, or an informal hedge you want closed over without waiting five years. It is not the Melaleuca distilled for tea tree oil, which shares the common name from another genus.

Stock runs from 75mm tubestock through to 100L advanced trees, covering both a cheap long screen line and a single position that needs height now. Coastal Tea Tree, Leptospermum laevigatum is the salt and wind specialist, grey-green with an open leaning habit, available to 45L. It has naturalised beyond its home range on parts of the southern coast, so check your council list before planting near bushland. Lemon Scented Tea Tree, Leptospermum petersonii is the tall one, a quick four to six metre tree with citrus-scented foliage, sold to 100L. Starry Night is the dark purple-foliage form and comes in the widest size range, 140mm up to 100L. For flower, Manuka Burgundy Queen carries double burgundy blooms on a compact bush. Leptospermum brachyandrum Silver is grown for weeping silver foliage and papery trunk rather than flower, and ForeShore is the low spreading form, 5L only, for banks and coastal edges.

Plant in an open, sunny position on ground that dries between waterings. Most forms finish between one and five metres, so match form to space before you plant. Leptospermum roots sit shallow, so on heavy clay plant into a raised bed rather than a dug hole, and keep lawn sprinklers off the crown. Water deeply while establishing, then let winter rain take over. Feed lightly with a low-phosphorus native fertiliser in spring, or not at all. Trim after flowering while the wood is green, taking no more than a third.

What hollows out a tea tree screen is webbing caterpillar, and it works from inside the bush, unseen until the damage is done. The larvae bind foliage, leaf litter and their own droppings into grey matted webs in the branch forks, shelter there by day, and feed out at night until the shoots around them are bare. A hedge solid in spring can show brown gaps through the middle by late summer, and because the webbing sheds water, spraying over the outside of the bush achieves very little. Part the plant and check inside it after flowering and again in late summer. Cut the affected wood out and bin it, then treat the rest with a Bacillus thuringiensis product, which is selective enough to leave the bees on the flowers alone.

Tea tree sits inside the wider natives range, and bottlebrush and paperbark handle the same conditions with different flower and bark, so they mix well in one bed. Where the job is a boundary, work from the privacy screening collection. Every order ships farm-direct with flat $99 delivery across QLD, NSW, VIC, SA, ACT and WA, a $399 minimum order, and the 30-Day Healthy Plant Guarantee.