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In spring this small native tree is almost smothered in creamy yellow, frangipani-like flowers with a strong heady fragrance. Plant details Common name: Native frangipani Botanical name: Hymenosporum flavum Description: Evergreen tree to about 10m (30′) tall in...
To many people a garden is an oasis, a place where they can escape the stress of busy lives, and just relax. If there’s one plant in particular which evokes memories of holidays, tropical beaches, and gives that calm, peaceful, rainforest sort of feel to the...
A wonderful plant for an architectural or a structural effect in the garden is the humble pencil pine, or Italian Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens var. Sricta). It is an evergreen tree to around 20 metres (60′) tall, with an upright, columnar form and dense dark...
A native of the wet tropical rainforests between Townsville and Cooktown, the graceful roly poly satinash is an outstanding ornamental plant. It has glorious weeping foliage highlighted by flushes of red to pink new growth for most of the year. Like most lilly pillies...
Scribbly gums are spectacular Australian trees with smooth, whitish yellow bark. The bark has a prominent feature which puzzles many people – strange looking ‘scribbles’ resembling some form of mysterious, ancient writing. The zigzag tracks are...
Camellias are wonderful flowering shrubs for the garden, but they also have many other uses. They can be shaped into topiaries, standards or espaliers, and they can even be grown as ground covers. At the moment standardised camellias are very fashionable, but...
Until recently if you wanted a flowering gum tree you had to just go out and buy one and hope for the best. Sometimes the flowers turned out red and other times pink, but quite often it was an insipid white which you didn’t really want anyway. The good news is...
Landscape Arthitect, Judy van Gelderen was given a very detailed brief by the owners of a small, flat and uninteresting block of land in Canberra. They wanted to incorporate fourteen different ‘spaces’ or characters, including Japanese, Australian, an English rose...
Williamstown Garden Gina and Ian McVicar searched for a long time for a house to serve as both a home and a business base. Then one day they saw an old fisherman’s cottage made of bluestone, and fell in love with it immediately. Even though the house had...
Have you noticed that your azaleas are looking a bit the worse for wear at the moment? If they have mottled grey/bronze leaves with sticky blobs of excrement on the leaf undersides, they’ve probably been damaged by either Azalea lace bug or Two-spotted mite (red...