Brush Cherry Syzygium australe Resilience (Eugenia australis)

Resilience was selected for its resistance to the psyllid that pimples and puckers the new leaves of older brush cherry hedges, and that name is the reason to read a cultivar tag rather than buying whatever unlabelled brush cherry is on the bench. Resistance is not immunity, and a stressed plant will still take damage, but on a fed and watered hedge it is the difference between a clean face and one you spend every summer picking over. The habit is upright and tightly branched from low down, and every flush comes through bronze red before hardening to small glossy dark green leaves.

Range and setting out

It handles coastal and inland gardens through Queensland, New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, with young plants wanting shelter from frost in cold districts for their first winters. Sun or part shade both work. Ground should drain, with compost worked through beforehand and mulch over the top afterwards. Space at 750mm to 1 metre for a screen and tighter again for a clipped low hedge. This is the one cultivar in the range that will genuinely be held anywhere from knee height to well above a paling fence, so settle the finished dimensions before planting rather than after.

Do not save it up for one cut a year

The way these plants get wrecked is the annual haircut. A hedge left to run for a season or two and then taken back hard is being cut into leafless old wood, and brush cherry is slow and patchy about reshooting from there. You can be looking at bare stems for months with no guarantee the face returns evenly, and the parts that do fill are the ones with light on them, which is rarely the middle of the row. Begin trimming while the plant is still smaller than its finished size and take a little off two or three times a season. Growth is moderate to fast, so that is not a burden, it is a few short passes between spring and the end of summer.

Against the coloured selections

Each of the others commits to one look. Hinterland Gold gives a gold flush on a fine leaf that suits formal shapes and wants the trimming to match. Plum Magic gives purple on a compact frame for low work only. Resilience is the general purpose plant of the group: conventional bronze red growth, tight branching, and no fixed ceiling. Pick it when the finished height is not settled, or when one cultivar has to cover several different jobs around the same garden and you would rather not match three sets of foliage. Pick Hinterland Gold instead when the shape is formal and the colour is the point. More screens sit in privacy screening.

Feeding around the cuts

Tie the feeding to the trimming rather than the calendar. A hedge fed just as it starts moving in spring recovers from a cut quickly and pushes a flush that hardens fast, which is the behaviour that keeps psyllid pressure low, so the resistance in the name is only doing half its job if the plant is hungry. A controlled release product suited to natives at the start of spring and a top up after the first summer cut will carry it, watered in each time. Keep moisture steady while the hedge fills in, because the first two summers decide whether the base stays furnished.

Choosing a size

This plant is available in 12 sizes, from 100mm up to 200L, priced from $16.95 to $999.00 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.