Golden Trumpet Tree Tabebuia chrysanthus

The golden trumpet tree drops every leaf late in the dry season and stands as bare grey sticks, then fills the whole crown with golden trumpets over a few days. The frame is open and upright, the leaves palmately compound with five slightly rough leaflets, and the bark corky and fissured on older trunks. It is planted as a flowering feature, one tree in a lawn or a courtyard where the flush can be seen from the house, and it turns up all over Brisbane and the northern rivers.

Warmth, drainage and the timing of the flush

Give it full sun and free draining soil. Growth is moderate and water needs are low once established, which suits a subtropical or warm temperate garden that goes through a dry winter. Flowering comes in short flushes rather than one long season, often set off by a dry spell followed by rain, so the timing shifts from year to year and even between gardens in the same street. You will also see the tree sold as Handroanthus chrysanthus, which is where botanists have moved the genus. Drainage matters more than fertility, and a mounded bed is worth the effort on clay. Wind is the other consideration, because a gale can strip a flush in a day.

The failure mode is cold. Young plants are frost tender, and in cool inland districts the tree may survive but flower thinly or not at all, leaving you with a sparse deciduous frame and no payoff. Treat it as a subtropical and warm temperate tree only. Where it does flower well, plan for the carpet of spent flowers, which has to be swept off paving and skimmed out of pools.

Golden trumpet, jacaranda or lasiandra

Among the flowering plants here, jacaranda is the larger tree with a longer, more dependable purple season and a filtered shade you can garden under, but it needs far more room and drops far more mess. Alstonville lasiandra works at shrub scale in autumn and can be pruned to fit, which suits a small courtyard. The golden trumpet sits between them: a modest, upright tree with a short, concentrated spring flush. Pick it when you want gold rather than purple and have a warm, well drained site. None of the three is a shade tree in the way the eucalypts and box trees in this batch are, so if canopy rather than colour is the requirement, look at those instead. More in flowering.

Pruning around the flower buds

Prune as soon as the flowers finish and before the new leaves harden. Cutting in late winter takes off the wood that was about to flower, which is the usual reason a healthy tree disappoints its owner. Keep the work light: shorten wayward shoots, remove crossing limbs, and build a clear single trunk while the tree is young. Feed in late summer with a fertiliser low in nitrogen and reasonably high in potassium, which supports bud set. Heavy nitrogen, including runoff from lawn feeding, gives a leafy tree with few trumpets. A light feed in early spring helps a young tree build its frame.

Choosing a size

This plant is available in 6 sizes, from 200mm up to 300L, priced from $29.95 to $1749.00 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 tree for a small backyard.