Ornamental Eucalyptus? You must be kidding!

Warning: ironies below

As you well know, Eucalyptus are those little diverse Australian trees, that all become giants, invasive unestoppable weeds, they deplete soil and lower watertables, so aggresive nothing grows under them, so poisonous nothing can grow where they once grew, as much troublegiving as unable to be planted in gardens because their roots spread for a hundred meters and can cause havoc to anything growing in their way. They have nil or low ornamental potential and in addition they are not cold hardy!

Fig 1: Example of compact growth in sculpted cold hardy Eucalyptus grown in big containers

Fig 2: Example of garden performance for Minilyptus, sculpted for mallee growth habit. Planted in company of red flowering Callistemon and with an understorey of different Hebe cultivars.

Fig 3: Example of distinct connate juvenile foliage and flower buds of the Spinning Gum Tree.

Fig 4: Example of heavily pruned (pollarded) Eucalyptus gunnii cultivated from a potted specimen and planted too close to infrastructures. Obligatorily submitted to size control operations and hence avoid excessive height growth and root spread.

So as you can see, our main recommendation is wihtout any doubt that you please keep growing Leylandii and forget about Eucalyptus as ornamentals.

Especially because in addition to the examples of non ornamental foliage displayed above, you can also check that their boring bark and too similar flower buds are not at all worth of cultivation from an aesthetic point of view! So we do not need to consider their flowers at all.

Summing up, the right thing would be sending them all back to Australia, because as you well know, eucalypts cannot make good timber either!

Contact GIT Forestry Consulting - Eucalyptologics

If you want to join us in this fundamentalist crusade for the erradication of Eucalyptus worldwide, please do not hesitate contacting us!

GIT's Eucalyptology Topics

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© 2007 Gustavo Iglesias Trabado. Please contact us if you want to use all or part of this text and photography elsewhere. We like to share, but we do not like rudeness.