Cottonwood Hibiscus Hibiscus tiliaceus

Cottonwood hibiscus leans rather than stands, throwing low spreading limbs into a broad canopy of heart-shaped leaves you can walk beneath. The flowers turn over daily. They open lemon yellow with a maroon throat, deepen through apricot to orange as the day goes on, and drop by evening, so there is a fresh set each morning and a scatter of spent ones underneath. It is a fast evergreen shade tree for parks, dune revegetation and large coastal gardens where salt, sand and wind rule out most alternatives.

Room to lean, and the limbs that come down

It grows through the warm coastal country of Queensland, northern New South Wales and the tropical north, in full sun to part shade, on moderate water, and it grows fast. Salt spray, sand, wind and periodic waterlogging are all within its tolerance, and it handles brief inundation, which is why it turns up along tidal margins and creek flats. It leans into the prevailing wind rather than fighting it. The failure mode is structural. The wood is soft and brittle, and the long low limbs that give the tree its character tear out in summer storms, often taking a strip of trunk bark with them. That makes it a poor choice overhanging a driveway, a shed roof, a pool fence or anywhere people park. Give it a generous setback, accept surface roots and heavy litter, and plant it over lawn, mulch or dune rather than paving, because the roots lift kerbs and pavers over time. It strikes readily from cuttings if you want to run a line of them along a boundary.

The green form or the burgundy one

Rubra is the same species with deep burgundy to near-black foliage, and the difference is not only colour. The green form is the larger, more spreading shade tree and the one used for genuine canopy in parks and revegetation, while rubra is grown as a colour block and tends to a broader, more multi-trunked shrub-tree. Take the green form when you want shade and scale on a coastal block. If your site is rural and inland rather than coastal, and you want a deciduous canopy instead, Australian red cedar is the tree for it. Both cottonwoods are stocked in super advanced trees.

Storm pruning and the annual feed

Prune in late winter or early spring, ahead of the storm season and while the tree is easy to read. Shorten long horizontal limbs before they get heavy rather than waiting for them to fail, keep the branch attachments spread along the trunk instead of clustered at one point, and remove narrow forks with included bark early. Reduction cuts suit it better than taking whole limbs off at the trunk. Formative pruning in the first three or four years is the work that decides whether the mature tree holds together. Feed once in spring with a complete fertiliser if growth has been poor, and mulch wide with the trunk collar left clear.

Choosing a size

This plant is available in 5 sizes, from 45L up to 700L, priced from $309.00 to $7799.00 per plant. The size shown is the pot the plant arrives in, which is the rootball, not the height of the plant. Every size here is established stock rather than a starter plant, so this line is intended for immediate effect rather than for growing on. Not sure which to choose? Read our guide to when to plant in Australia.