Larry Smith and the Riverside Gardens team talk all things pots, plants and pruning in their weekly gardening column.
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After much anticipation, waiting, patience, promises, broken promises, stories and excuses, we have finally received our order of grafted evergreen standards and weeping plants.
Some of these plants have been on order for years, so it was great to finally see them start to become available again.
The sudden increase in demand for these plants back in 2020-21 created a hole in the available stock, and it has taken growers this long to catch up again.
This is not an unusual turnaround time for this type of plant, but when you are starting from an almost empty barrel, it takes time to build the numbers up again.
Some of the stars that arrived this week were grafted acacias, like acacia ‘waterfall’, which is a narrow-leafed groundcover variety of acacia cognata, grafted on to a 1.8-metre-tall stem to form a delicate looking, soft column of weeping wattle.
The graceful cascading foliage will reach the ground and spread out if left without pruning or shaping. It produces fluffy lemon balls of flowers during spring.
Another is acacia baileyana ‘goldilocks’ with fine feathery greyish foliage spreading out from a 1.5-metre-high grafted stem.
Growing to about 2m high and wide, they flower with bright golden ball flowers in late winter.
These grafted varieties of the popular Cootamundra wattle set sterile seeds, so there is no concern about them becoming a weed, like the non-grafted versions that we refrain from selling in this area.
This plant makes a stunning feature, but be sure to give it the room it needs to show off its full beauty.
We also had some grafted grevilleas arrive, like grevillea ‘Lana Maree’, which is a beautiful standard grevillea that has dense upright foliage, grafted on a 1.5-metre stem.
It has bright pink metallic flowers that are produced year-round, attracting nectar-feeding birds and pollinating insects.
Fully grown, it should reach around 1.5 metres across.
In weeping grevillea, we have ‘Aussie Crawl’, which has a heavy weeping habit with deeply serrated dark green leaves and bronze new growth.
The striking burgundy toothbrush flowers appear in autumn and again in spring, attracting native wildlife, bees, nectar-eating birds and butterflies.
This tough native shrub will thrive in any garden and will tolerate drought and frost, but be sure to give it plenty of sun.
A rather different weeping grevillea is grevillea ‘Sunkissed Waters’, with its attractive dissected green and gold variegated foliage that has new growth flushed pink.
The large red toothbrush-like flowers appear in spring and summer in abundance, making a striking appearance against the variegated foliage.
Another of the acacias is acacia cardiophylla ‘Gold Lace’, which will grow to around 1.5m high and wide.
It has fine lacy bottle-green foliage with deep yellow flowers in spring and summer.
Having a naturally dense growth habit, this plant provides a good habitat for small birds like wrens in your garden as well as adding a great feature.
A few of the other grafted natives that arrived were grevillea 'Gaudi Chaudi' weepers and acacia cognata ‘limelight’ standards, but most of these have gone to fulfil existing orders we had.
The only of the evergreen weepers we had been waiting on were camellia ‘Marge Miller’ standards.
Camellia ‘Marge Miller’ was the first prostrate camellia in the world and is an Australian introduction; it features double pink flowers over dark green foliage.
When trained to be a one-metre-high standard and allowed to weep back down, the results are quite something.
So, if you are out and about over Easter, drop in for a game of mini-golf with the family, then check out our new arrivals of evergreen standards and weepers.
They have taken a while to get here, and we are pretty proud to show them off.
Happy Easter from all at Riverside Gardens.
Growing For Success