Brush Cherry Syzygium australe Northern Select (Eugenia australis)

Northern Select is the conventional brush cherry look in a hedging selection: bronze red new leaves over glossy dark green, fluffy white flowers through the warm months, then crimson fruit the birds work through. It grows upright and tall for the group, so its job is screening above fence height rather than edging at border level. There is no novelty colour here, and that is the point of it. When the brief is a solid green wall between you and a neighbouring window, this is the plant that does it without asking for a colour scheme to be built around it.

Eastern seaboard, and the southern capitals

It is a plant for the eastern seaboard and the milder southern capitals, growing through Queensland and along the New South Wales coast, and on into Victoria, the ACT and the settled southern districts of South Australia and Western Australia. Young stock is the tender part, so in cold inland gardens give the first couple of winters some shelter. It wants soil that drains but still holds organic matter, so dig compost through sand or clay before planting, mulch the row afterwards and keep the mulch clear of the stems. Set the row at 750mm to 1 metre between plants.

Leave a gap behind the hedge

The mistake specific to a tall screening hedge is planting it hard up against the fence or wall it is meant to hide, usually to save 400mm of garden bed. The inner face then never gets light and never dries after rain or irrigation. Honeydew from scale and psyllid builds up on foliage no air moves through, sooty mould blackens it, and the hedge goes bare from the inside out while still looking respectable from the front, so nobody finds out until a fence panel needs replacing and the row has to be cut away. Set the line at least half a metre off the barrier, and thin the crossing interior growth once a year so light and air reach the middle of each plant.

Bulk and height, or colour

Beside Plum Magic and Winter Lights, which are bought for purple and for cool season bronze on smaller frames, Northern Select is bought for bulk and height. The closer comparison is Resilience, which flushes much the same bronze red. Resilience holds a tighter, denser base and is the better plant where the hedge has to be kept low or shaped precisely, while Northern Select puts more of its energy into height and gets a two storey outlook covered sooner. Above head height either will do the work, and the choice usually comes down to the stock size available.

Trimming and feeding

Shape it from the first season. A hedge trimmed early branches low and stays furnished at the base, while one left to run for two years and then cut back hard is sitting in bare wood and takes a long time to green over. Cut once each flush has hardened through spring and summer and put the shears away as the weather cools. Two feeds carry it, one as growth first moves and one after midsummer, and mulch matters as much as the fertiliser on this cultivar, because it is holding a lot of leaf on shallow roots and the top of the profile is where those roots sit.

Choosing a size

This plant is available in 3 sizes, from 200mm up to 100L, priced from $29.95 to $649.00 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 choosing a lilly pilly.