Growing for Success | ‘Unbeleafable’ ferns and palms for your gardens!

Dicksonia antarctica, the soft tree fern, is a great example of this, with its crown of long arching fronds on top of its brown fibrous trunk, the mind straight away imagines a cool lush ferny gully under a canopy of foliage.

The soft tree fern is very tough and in our region is the best choice of a reliable fern for a shady position in the garden.

The graceful fronds unfurl from the centre crown quite quickly throughout the warmer months of the year, but the trunk below only grows about three to five centimetres a year.

This would make some of the larger ones you see growing in nature about 200 years old, not something easily replaced.

That is why when you are purchasing tree ferns, they must be supplied with a tag from a licensed harvester to ensure the sustainability of these protected ferns.

Apart from keeping the crown and trunk moist through the warmer months, the only maintenance required is the removal of dead and dying fronds every now and then.

Palms such as the Bangalow palm (Archontophoenix cunninghamiana) or the Cocos palm/queen palm (Syagrus Romanzoffiana) can create a tropical feel to their surroundings.

Of these two I would lean towards the Bangalow palm as my choice, even though it will take a bit of nurturing to get it going through the first year.

Being from the rainforests of northern NSW and Queensland they require a fair amount of moisture and warmer weather, but if given some protection in their first year from frost they acclimatise quite well.

They have smooth, long slender trunks that are slightly swollen at the base, with prominent leaf scare rings all the way up the trunk, giving them a decorative appearance.

They are quite often grown as multi-trunk plants with three or four trunks coming from the base.

Bangalow palms are a lot cleaner than Cocos palms and unlike the Cocos palms, seldom set seed in our cooler region.

Strelitzia nicolai, the giant bird of paradise, has large, banana-tree-like leaves that will instantly make you feel like you’re living in a tropical oasis.

Named after its large white and black bird-shaped flower that appears in autumn and summer, the giant bird of paradise can work well with Bangalow palms.

Strelitzia nicolai can reach five to six metres high (although one I have at home would be at least eight metres high) and grow in full sun to part shade, with thick watery trunks and lush dark green huge leaves.

The iconic Australian grass trees are another group of plants that set the tone for the surrounding garden.

Xanthorrhoea plants are protected plants in their natural state and once again must be sold with a tag from a registered supplier.

They are extremely slow-growing and difficult to transplant from the ground.

There are seed-grown plants available, but these are a long-term project given their rate of growth.

We have a seed-grown Xanthorrhoea johnsonii super grass tree growing in the ground in the front courtyard of the garden centre.

This was grown from a 140 millimetre pot about 30 years ago and has reached about 1.25m high over that time.

A few years ago, we flash-fired the old foliage stubs to create the classic black trunks that they are known for.

Being seed-grown it is multi-branched, as there were originally a few plants growing in one pot.

It flowers every year with tall flower spikes up to 2.5m high that are visited frequently by New Holland honey eaters that love the sweet vanilla-flavoured nectar it produces.

When working out the planting scheme for your garden, it is worth thinking about what plants typically make the statement of the style of the garden you are creating.

They are quite often, but not always, more expensive than the other plants you are using but if is worth the outlay given they can bring home the style you were looking for and make the whole garden work together.