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Growing For Success | The right fit for tight planting space

By Riverside Gardens

Feb 15, 2024

Excellent specimen: Persian spire is valued for its rich autumn colour and attractive flaking bark. Photo by Contributed

Larry Smith and the Riverside Gardens team talk about all things pots, plants and pruning in their weekly gardening column.

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An area that gives a lot of people grief when designing their garden is the narrow space between the drive and the fence, or the services side of the house and the fence, the narrow space left between the shed or alfresco area and the path — pretty much any of those spaces that have tight restraints on the width plants can grow. With a bit of thought, though, there is a solution for most situations, but it is also an area where a lot of mistakes are made.

A plant can be described as narrow even though it will reach 3m wide, and this is only because it is going to grow 15m high. Now, that is different from what you want growing in that tight space beside your house. Yet a tall, narrow, 15m-high tree could look great as an avenue planted in a restricted space along a rural drive to home. Yes, it is as simple as it seems, but it is so often poorly executed, and extra work is created to keep the plants in check. So here are a few plants to consider for the relatively narrow spaces you are working with.

Ilex crenata, or sky pencil, is a tight, upright form of Japanese holly that grows up to 3m high by about 80cm wide. It has small, glossy, dark green foliage and grows in full sun to part shade. This slow to medium-growing evergreen shrub needs good drainage and likes a slightly cooler spot in the garden.

Callistemon slim is a narrow-growing native bottle brush that can reach 3m high by 1.3m wide with red bottlebrush flowers. A typically hardy bottlebrush that has a bushy upright habit with foliage all the way from the ground up unless otherwise pruned.

Syzygium straight and narrow is a slender, semi-compact and dense native lily pilly. It has glossy green, attractive leaves, and white flowers. Straight and narrow, it grows five to eight metres tall and around 1.5m wide. It can be pruned to around 2m high to make a great dense hedge if required.

Prunus cerasifera, or oakville crimson spire, is a narrow form of flowering plum with rich burgundy foliage and light pink to white flowers in spring. This deciduous small tree grows to 6m high and around 2m wide and is extremely hardy.

Quercus palustris pringreen, or green pillar, is a narrow form of pin oak. It has a tight columnar habit with deeply lobed foliage that is vibrant green and turns various shades of bronze and deep red in the autumn months before dropping its leaf. Mature size is about 14m high by 3m wide.

Pyrus javelin is a narrower form of the popular capital ornamental pear; it has all the same characteristics but only grows to 2.5m wide by 10m high.

Parrotia persica, or Persian spire, is a new release that we will be stocking this winter. It is a narrower growing variety of the Persian witchhazel that only reaches 3m wide by 8m high. It still has a stunning mixture of autumn-coloured foliage of purple, red, yellow and orange, but the leaf is slightly smaller.

Then, there are various plants that lend themselves to espaliering and trellising that work extremely well in really tight spaces, turning trouble areas into unique features in the garden. This does require a bit of work, but it is not all that hard, and you will be well rewarded for your effort. It also opens up a whole new conversation, one that would probably best be had in the garden centre, where we can not only show you plants that are suitable for this but also some great mature examples in our gardens of what can be achieved and how to go about it.

While you are there, allow time to relax and take a stroll through our golf gardens. They are looking a picture, and you might pick up a few ideas as you go.