Pink Champion Cordyline Cordyline fruticosa Pink Champion

Pink Champion is grown for pink. Its leaves carry broad hot pink bands, margins and streaks running the length of the blade over a darker base, and the amount of pink shifts across the crown, from fine pencil lines on some leaves to wide bands on others. It suits a covered courtyard or a shaded verandah, where it gives the kind of colour that usually takes flowers, and it gives it all year.

Filtered light and a slow introduction to sun

Bright filtered light is the target: an east facing courtyard, a spot under shade cloth or a high canopy, or a covered patio open to the sky on one side. A dim corner dulls the pink to a muddy rose. If you want it in more sun, move it there gradually over two or three weeks in spring rather than straight from shade into a summer afternoon, which can burn it within days. Being a Cordyline fruticosa, it is tropical at heart. It grows in the ground in frost free coastal gardens from northern New South Wales up, and in sheltered pockets of Sydney and Perth, but it marks in long cold spells, a light frost burns the leaves and a hard or repeated frost kills it. Gardens with a real winter should keep it potted and give it an enclosed verandah or a bright room from May to September. Use a rich, free draining mix with some bark through it, keep it evenly moist in the warm months and drier in winter, and keep it out of cold draughts.

Brown tips, spots and what the water is doing

Rainwater suits it better than town water, because ti plants are sensitive to fluoride and the damage shows as dead, crisp tips on a pink leaf where it is hard to miss. Where tap water is all you have, water heavily enough each time that it runs freely out of the drainage holes, which also carries away the salts fertiliser leaves behind. Fawn or brown spots with darker edges are a different problem, a fungal leaf spot that follows overhead watering in humid weather. Keep water off the crown, space pots so air moves between them, and pull off badly marked leaves. Go easy on fertiliser: a slow release product at half the rate on the pack, once in spring and once in summer, with none in winter. Shorten a top heavy cane in late spring and new shoots come from lower on the cane. On a verandah shared with a cat or dog, stand the pot where they cannot chew it, since the leaves are toxic to both.

Pink Champion or Pink Diamond

The closest sibling is Pink Diamond Cordyline, which carries its pink as flecks and edging on a green and cream leaf and makes a taller plant that handles more direct sun. Choose Pink Diamond for an open garden bed or a row along a fence; choose Pink Champion when the plant is going into a pot on a sheltered patio and the colour has to do the work. For warm streaks of yellow and orange alongside the pink, Early Morning Diamond Cordyline mixes them on the one plant. Every pink, red and green form is listed together in the Cordyline collection, which makes the colours easier to compare.

Choosing a size

This plant is supplied in one size, 300mm, at $109.00 per plant. The size shown is the pot it arrives in, which is the rootball, not the height of the plant. Not sure which to choose? Read our guide to low water gardens.