Brush Cherry Syzygium australe Winter Lights (Eugenia australis)

Winter Lights is named for what it does out of season. The outer growth carries warm bronze and orange tones through the cold months, sitting over darker mature foliage below, so the hedge has something in it during the part of the year when most evergreen screens are a flat green wall. Underneath that it behaves like the rest of the brush cherries: dense to the ground, knitting into a screen at a moderate to fast rate, fluffy white flowers in the warm months and pink edible fruit behind them. Hedging, screening and boundary privacy are its work.

Position decides whether you get the colour

This is the cultivar where placement rather than culture determines whether you get what you paid for. Under eaves, along a south facing fence line or beneath established trees, the bronze and orange never really develops. The plant reaches for light instead, the interior thins, and you are left with an ordinary green hedge on bare legs. Give it an open position with sun for at least half the day, and put it where it is actually seen from the house in winter, not down the side of the block. The tones also read stronger where nights are genuinely cold, which makes it a better proposition in Victoria, the ACT and the southern tablelands than in a humid subtropical garden, though it grows well in both.

Ground, water and the cold districts

It suits gardens through coastal Queensland, New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria and the milder parts of South Australia and Western Australia, with young plants worth sheltering through their first winter or two in cold inland districts. Free draining soil improved with compost, mulch over the roots, and a deep soak in dry spells, never a daily sprinkle, because a stressed hedge sheds its inner leaves before its outer ones and is slow to refurnish afterwards. Plants go in at 750mm to 1 metre centres for an unbroken screen.

Winter colour set against warm season colour

Every coloured brush cherry here flushes in the growing season. Big Red reddens with each new push and Plum Magic does the same in purple on a much smaller plant, but both have hardened to plain green by the time winter arrives. What Winter Lights offers is timing rather than intensity. Set against a plain screening selection such as Northern Select, you are trading some height and bulk for seasonal interest. Take Winter Lights for a hedge in view of the living areas through winter, and Big Red if you would rather have the colour while the rest of the garden is already busy. Other screens are grouped in privacy screening.

The cut that costs you the colour

Trim through spring and summer as each flush hardens, then leave the plant alone from autumn onwards. A tidy up cut in April or May removes precisely the outer growth this cultivar is grown for, and you will not see the colour again until the following winter. Feed as growth begins and once more before the end of summer so the plant carries plenty of outer growth into the cold months, then stop, and do not push soft late growth that will neither colour nor harden. Rake clippings and any pimpled tips out from under the hedge instead of leaving them on the mulch.

Choosing a size

This plant is available in 6 sizes, from 200mm up to 200L, priced from $29.95 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.