Hard Quandong Elaeocarpus obovatus

Hard quandong grows dense and roughly pyramidal when young, filling to a rounded head with age. The leaves are glossy dark green, broadest towards the tip and lightly toothed, with a bronze flush on new growth, and small cream bells with fringed edges hang along the stems before the blue fruit that pigeons and figbirds strip. It clips readily and takes coastal wind, which is why it turns up in street plantings, car park islands and evergreen screens where a fig would simply be too much tree.

Rainforest margins, coastal streets

In the wild it grows along rainforest edges and creeklines from the far north coast of New South Wales up through Queensland, and it wants a warm, frost free climate close to that. Full sun and part shade both work, including the shade cast by neighbouring buildings, which is unusual in a tree this dense. Growth is moderate to fast with moderate water and soil improved with organic matter. Space plants around 1 m apart for a clipped hedge and 2 m for an informal screen. Frost is the limit rather than heat, so gardens with regular winter frosts should look elsewhere, and it is more shade tolerant than most screening natives, which helps along a south facing boundary.

The failure mode is underestimating the width. This is a broader plant than its narrow relatives, and set a metre off a wall or a fence line it ends up sheared hard on one side every year, which thins the foliage and spoils the crown. Give it room to make its natural rounded head, or accept that you are committing to a hedge and prune it as one from the start.

The broad one of the three quandongs

Set against Eumundi quandong, which is columnar and narrow, hard quandong is the wider and tougher plant, better in salt wind and better under the shears. Set against blueberry ash it is denser and less showy: blueberry ash is the flowering feature, hard quandong the workhorse screen and street tree. Choose it for a formal hedge, a windy coastal boundary or a street verge, and choose Eumundi where the gap is narrow. Hard quandong is also the one that will take a hedge trimmer year after year and stay dense, which is why it turns up in commercial plantings far more often than the other two. Larger specimens appear under mature trees.

Clipping and feeding a hedge or a tree

Prune in late winter or early spring before the main flush, and again lightly once the summer growth has hardened if you are holding a formal line. As a tree, remove the lower branches gradually to lift the crown and take out crossing wood. As a hedge, clip little and often rather than cutting hard into bare wood. Feed in early spring with a controlled release fertiliser suited to natives and repeat in midsummer for clipped plants, which are working harder. Mulch well and keep the water up in dry spells while it establishes. Feed clipped hedges twice a season and unclipped trees once.

Choosing a size

This plant is available in 9 sizes, from 200mm up to 2000L, priced from $40.95 to $3309.00 per plant. The size shown is the pot the plant arrives in, which is the rootball, not the height of the plant. The smaller pots hold younger plants that cost less each and establish quickly, which suits hedges, screens and mass planting where the plant count adds up. The larger sizes carry several more years of growth on the farm and give height and presence straight away, which is what you want for a single feature position or a screen that cannot wait. Not sure which to choose? Read our guide to Australian native trees.