Western Red Cedar Thuja plicata

Western Red Cedar does a job the dwarf Thuja forms cannot. It is a forest conifer from the Pacific north west of North America, and in a garden that inheritance gives a tall, dense, fine textured screen or windbreak that takes regular clipping and more shade than most conifers will. Crush a spray of foliage and you get a sharp, fruity scent often compared to pineapple. The sprays are flat, glossy and deep green, marked pale underneath, and on older trunks the bark turns red brown and stringy.

Left alone it builds a broad based pyramid with branches sweeping right to the ground, and it needs genuine room to do that. Planted in a row and clipped from the start, it forms a hedge with a soft, even face, which is how most Australian gardens use it.

Cool summers, damp roots

Mild summers and damp soil are what it needs, which in practice means the Dandenongs, Gippsland, the Adelaide Hills, the Southern Highlands and the New South Wales tablelands, with Melbourne and Canberra gardens workable where the soil is kept moist. It takes frost and cold without complaint. What it will not take is heat combined with dry soil. Through a hot, dry summer the foliage bronzes and browns, and in the subtropics and the hot inland it never looks settled, so treat western Sydney, Brisbane and Perth with caution.

Plant into deep soil that holds moisture yet drains, improved with compost and mulched well beyond the drip line. It grows in full sun where summers are mild and accepts part shade readily, which makes it useful on the south side of a block where cypress goes thin. Give it a long, slow soak every week of its first two summers, and keep checking it during heat waves for years after that. Spacing, and the species worth avoiding, are covered in Conifers for screening and structure.

Clip early, renovate slowly

Size is the catch. Unclipped, it becomes a large tree, far too big for a narrow side passage or a small suburban boundary, so it has to be shaped from the first year if you want a hedge rather than a tree. Clip lightly two or three times through the growing season instead of once hard, and keep the base a little wider than the top so light reaches the lower branches. It is more forgiving than Leyland or Monterey cypress: older wood will often shoot again after a hard cut, but slowly and unevenly, so reduce an overgrown hedge one face at a time over two seasons rather than all at once.

Scatter a conifer fertiliser over the root zone as growth starts in spring, then renew the mulch. Browning from dry roots is far more common than disease, and spider mite can turn the foliage dull and greyish during a hot, dry spell. Some people find the foliage irritates their skin, so wear gloves and long sleeves for a big clip.

Which conifer for which job

For a screen in a narrow bed, Thuja occidentalis Smaragd holds a slim cone at a fraction of the size. For low formal accents and pots, its relative Thuja orientalis Morganii, now Platycladus orientalis, stays small and turns bronze and orange through winter. Western Red Cedar is the choice for scale: a tall hedge, a windbreak, or a single specimen on a large cool climate block. Other tall screening options sit in Privacy & Screening Plants.

Choosing a size

This plant is available in 3 sizes, from 300mm up to 500mm, priced from $159.00 to $529.00 per plant. The size shown is the pot the plant arrives in, which is the rootball, not the height of the plant. Every size here is established stock rather than a starter plant, so this line is intended for immediate effect rather than for growing on. Not sure which to choose? Read our guide to fast growing screening plants.