Callistemons For Leaf Colour
Callistemons - commonly called bottlebrush - are one of the most popular native plant families that we sell, widely planted and loved. They're usually grown for their abundant, showy, and very colourful bottlebrush flowers, which they can often produce more than once a year. these are usually red, but also come in white, cream, pale pink, bright pink, orange, and purple.Did you know that many callistemon varieties also have very colourful new leaves - giving you double the colour, double the enjoyment, double the value!
Pink Leaf Callistemon
There is a species of bottlebrush tree,
Callistemon salignus, that has the common name of
pink tips; because its new leaves are a vibrant deep shade of pink.The very pinkest of the pink tips trees were carefully selected and bred to produce the dwarf pink tips cultivar, Great Balls of Fire. If you are looking for foliage colour in a bottlebrush, this is the start and finish for many gardeners! It's a beautiful feature plant and a spectacular hedge.There are several other callistemons that can give pink tips and its offspring a run for their money. Like Perth Pink, which is also a salignus variety - along with the bright pink new leaves, it has shocking pink flowers too.
Shown, clockwise from top left :
Rust & Tan Leaf Callistemon
Whether you call this colour rust, tan, copper, brick red, red-brown, chestnut... there are many bottlebrush varieties that can add a touch of it to your garden.It's typically a range of shades associated with autumn, as the leaves turn; but for the callistemons it's more likely to be seen in spring, as the new leaves emerge.Red Rover has been especially bred to be a non-flowering bottlebrush, without the bottlebrushes - it's all about those rust-red leaves. Great news for allergy sufferers as that means it's pollen free too!
Shown, clockwise from top left :
Burst Leaf Callistemon
Red Rover and Red Alert above are both
Ozbreed cultivars, bred in Australia.Ozbreed likes strong leaf colour in their callistemon, as can be seen in their new 'Burst' range of bottlebrushes. These new varieties have vibrantly coloured flowers in hot magenta, icy white,
shell pink tipped with gold - very showy! But these Ozbreed Burst varieties are also worth planting for their foliage too, which glows in shades of copper, bronze, silver-olive.
Shown, clockwise from top left :
Silver Leaf Callistemon
If you like the silvery-olive-lilac look of the Snow Burst foliage above, there's a few more callistemons in store for you to enjoy. The callistemon varieties here have bottlebrush blooms in shades from pale pink through musk pink to deep red and magenta purple, so you'll get a colourful show twelve months of the year, from their foliage and flowers.
Shown, clockwise from top left :
Peach Leaf Callistemon
This selection of callistemon varieties is perhaps not as strongly coloured in the foliage department as the other varieties above, but they are no less attractive for that. Perhaps they are more attractive for some gardeners, as their subtle colouring makes it easier to combine with a wider range of garden plants.They take on the strongest leaf colours when planted where the light can shine through the leaves, when you look at them - the foliage can almost seem to glow in early morning or late afternoon.
Shown, clockwise from top left :
