Larry Smith and the Riverside Gardens team talk all things pots, plants and pruning in their weekly gardening column.
One of the common dilemmas we help customers with is what to plant in narrow spaces.
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Whether dealing with a tight one-metre area in a residential town block or a four-metre-wide farm avenue plantation, many customers are often perplexed about how to best utilise the space.
If you look around, you’ll see that this issue is frequently mishandled.
The consequences can include scratched cars, overgrown pathways and plants that are either hacked back to remain under control or simply look out of place.
There are several ways to treat these areas. If you’re in search of narrow or fastigiate-growing plants, you might consider the following options:
Ilex crentata ‘Sky Pencil’ is a narrow, strongly columnar evergreen Japanese holly with small dark green leaves and tiny white flowers that appear in late summer.
Sky Pencil will grow in full sun to part shade to about two metres high and around twenty-five centimetres wide.
This makes it ideal for very narrow spaces, although it is slow-growing.
Callistemon Slim forms a neat, upright growing column. This narrow, fast-growing native bottle brush has masses of red flowers in spring.
Left un-trimmed, it will reach about three metres in height and one metre in width.
Callistermon Slim
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Syzygium ‘Upright and Tight’ has a very dense, slender habit, tight, compact growth, attractive glossy leaves and white flowers.
Planted at one metre apart, they will form a very dense, narrow screen.
Their mature size is approximately six metres high and one and a half metres wide. Another Syzygium variety, ‘Straight and Narrow,’ is also useful in these spaces.
It is slightly wider but just as dense and quick-growing. Both varieties are resistant to psyllid attacks, which can disfigure the leaves of other Lily Pilly trees.
Prunus ‘Oakville Crimson Spire’ is a fastigiate flowering plum tree with a compact, uniform habit, its branches almost growing parallel to the main trunk.
It is a deciduous tree with white flowers that turn pink before the bronze leaves emerge in spring.
Growing to about six metres in height and two metres in width, it requires slightly more room but is still an excellent choice for urban settings.
Oakville Crimson Spire
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Quercus palustris ‘Green Pillar’ is a columnar growing Pin Oak that grows to about fourteen metres high by three metres wide. It is ideally suited for avenue plantations, carparks and larger gardens. The leaves turn a deep red to bronze in autumn before dropping to reveal their tightly structured branches.
Pyrus ‘Javelin’ is an even skinnier version of the popular Capital Ornamental Pear. It is growing the same height as the Capital Pear but only two to two and a half metres wide with the same flowers and colourful leaves that have made the Capital so popular.
Magnolia ‘TMGH’ Alta is another option for larger spaces requiring narrow plantings. Its elegant form makes it ideal for screening, hedging, avenues, and fence lines.
It grows more quickly than other forms of Magnolia Grandiflora and reaches a size of around nine metres in height and four metres in width.
Magnolia ALTRA
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Another way of utilising narrow areas is through the use of espaliers, which make a stiking feature.
However that opens up an entirely different topic and a vast range of plants, so it's best to leave that discussion for another time.
In the meantime, if you are looking for narrow planting solutions, drop by the garden centre, to explore some of these suggestions and discuss what best suits your garden’s needs.
