Golden Grevilleas

To mark Australia Day 2022, we asked all the readers of our weekly email newsletter to vote for their favourite native plant.
The overwhelming winner, with a quarter of all the votes cast (!) was Grevillea.

 

" I can never have enough. Always looking for more to try and fit in. I love the birds they bring."

"I love this plant [Grevillea Coconut Ice] because it is in flower 365 days a year, the birds adore its nectar, and it provides shelter to small birds and animals."

"I have 7 varieties of grevilleas and I have planted a tree for each family member in our garden since we bought our house"

"Grevillea Orange Marmalade I love the variety of flower colours and especially watching all the birds that love them as much as I do"

 

Grevilleas For Every Garden

Grevilleas generally love free draining light soil, low in nutrients, and dry air.

Although they are native, they are very tricky to propagate. We propagate them in the winter months, when humidity is lowest here on the east coast, for the best chance of success.

 

We have 80 different varieties of grevillea in stock through the year, according to season.

There's a grevillea for every kind of garden space, from tall trees to compact groundcovers. And they come in a surprisingly wide range of colours!

The favourites with most of our gardeners are the golden grevilleas, to bring us sunshine even on the cloudiest of days.

 

Golden Grevillea Trees

Add a tree full of Aussie sunshine to your garden with these larger-sized grevillea varieties.

If you have the space, silky oaks (Grevillea robusta) are the one to choose - super-tall, super-slender, with deep green tiny leaves along swooping upturned branches.

Once a year they glow intense orange as the long flowerbuds open. It's like Mother Nature's fireworks show.

Slightly smaller, more suited to suburban gardens and street plantings, the brown silky oak (Grevillea baileyana) puts on its own midsummer display of long creamy flowers.

The rest of the year it shows off metallic copper-gold undersides to every glossy deep green leaf.

 

Big Golden Grevillea Shrubs

Left to their own devices, these shrubs can reach tree-sized proportions, albeit the smaller garden-friendly size of tree.

They also respond well to pruning to keep them a more manageable size, or to grow them as multi-stemmed plants instead of with a single trunk.

 

Honey Gem is a beautiful tree in or out of flower - the large honey-gold firework flowers are very showy, and very appealing to native birds. So you might notice this one for the excitement, noise, and colour of feeding lorikeets and honeyeaters, before you notice the flowers!

When it's not flowering, the long slender feathery leaves catch passing breezes, gently swaying in silvery waves.

 

Yamba Sunshine is a brighter yellow version of Honey Gem - big flowers, long feathery foliage, fantastic for birdlife.

 

Sandra Gordon is a step-sibling of Honey Gem; they share a parent that comes from northern Australia, which means both these varieties stand up well to more humid environments along the east coast.

It's one of the oldest hybrids grown in gardens, tried and tested for decades.

 

Best-selling Orange Marmalade is an unusual kind of grevillea because it thrives in the humid rainy always-warm climate of our Sunshine Coast nursery.

It's a cultivar of a rainforest grevillea species from far north QLD, and the long glossy smooth oval leaves mark it out as something different.

The burnt orange upright curled flowers, which seem to appear throughout the year, are also a little different to the usual grevillea flower.

 

Elegant feathery Golden Lyre won't get to tree height - it usually tops out around head-height; but it might get to tree width!

It's a wide-spreading grevillea, producing sweeping horizontal branches laden with huge golden flowers. Very handsome when given enough space to shine.

 

Compact Golden Grevillea Shrubs

These shrubs will give you plenty of garden impact, plenty of birdlife visiting to feed; but are small enough to squeeze into suburban back yards where space might be tight.

 

We grow hedges of Amber Blaze in the nursery and it always looks beautiful.

It's well named - those big flowers really seem to glow like a fire - and the feathery new foliage is flushed with golden-bronze too.

The stems weep and cascade, to create a very flowy informal hedge.

 

Canterbury Gold is a resilient hybrid, coping with frost, drought, humidity and salt spray.

It grows taller than it's wide, filling up your garden borders with buttery yellow blooms.

 

Our Cooroora Cascade is always in demand and sells out fast. No wonder, because this beautiful grevillea grows in low wide mounds, and in midsummer is a fountain of bright yellow gold.

It's used for amenity planting in the Sunshine Coast, so it's pretty easy-going and low maintenance once established.

 

Golden Grevillea Groundcovers

These grevilleas are small enough for container growing, and look perfect planted at the front of garden borders, or around taller native shrubs for a two-layer effect.

 

Petite Gold Rush is a hybrid of two southern species; this gives it resilience and adaptability to differing garden conditions. It's tolerant of frost and drought once established.

It's big enough to make a colourful show in bright yellow with stripes of scarlet, and small enough to plant up in a windowbox or container on the patio.

 

It shares the same parents as other petite grevilleas like Charlie's Angel; Bonnie Prince Charlie; and Fire Cracker, which all are brilliantly colourful, with a more red and a less yellow in their combos.

 

For little low grevilleas that spread out a long way, there are two golden-flowered varieties that are ideal.

Lemon Daze shares parentage with the Gold Rush family, and shares their red-yellow colourway and slender rosemary-like foliage.

 

Neat groundcovering Sunkissed has the buttery tones of Canterbury Gold, above, and makes a beautiful pairing with that larger grevillea when planted alongside.

If you have clay soils, Sunkissed does better than most other grevilleas, which tend to prefer lighter sandy soils. It also flowers twice a year in autumn and spring - fantastic value for your native garden.

Have we tempted you to find a place for a golden grevillea in your garden?

Take a look through our product gallery below to see what we have in stock right now!