When you want late summer and autumn colour with maximum impact, you can't go past tibouchinas.
If you live somewhere with mild winters, and reliable rainfall, chances are you've passed one on your journey and wondered "what is that luminous purple plant?" These purple plants - sometimes pink plants, occasionally white plants - originate from South America : Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and northern Argentina, Mexica and across the Caribbean. So you can guess that they like it warm, humid, frost-free in winter, and with plentiful rain.We've got fourteen tibouchinas in our range through the year, so let's take a look, and discover which one is best for your garden!
Tibouchina Trees
Three of our tibouchina varieties will readily grow to tree size, and in not much time at all : Alstonville, Kathleen, and Noelene.
Tibouchinas are fast-growing! Tibouchinas are happy to be pruned to shape if they get too big - we cut our nursery plants hard to a metre-high trunk each year for propagation material, and they soon resprout. Though if you're looking for a hedge, it's a better choice for you and the tibouchina to plant a shorter variety - there are heaps to choose from - than to hard-prune a tree variety every year to keep it small.
Our customer Roland shared a photo his six-year-old tibouchina Kathleen trees with us, here already overtopping the roof of his lowset home and covered in abundant flowers.
Kathleen grows to around 5 metres tall, with a broad round crown. It often has two periods of flowering, spring and autumn, when it is covered in large dusky pink flowers. Super-showy in full bloom; site Kathleen with an eye to the future size, to give it plenty of room to grow to its full potential.
This one, flowering at the top of our mothersock paddock, can be seen from a long way off.
Alstonville grows to around 5 metres tall, with a broad round crown. The evergreen leaves are longer and more slender than other varieties, and the flowers an intense rich royal purple, appearing in abundance from late summer into winter. Alstonville is vigorous, and won't take much time to get established in your garden.
Tibouchina Three Colours
These varieties are all hybrids of the species Tibouchina mutabilis - meaning mutable, or changeable, as their flowers change colour as they open.When you grow them, you'll also spot some white petals which have a darker pink or purple watercolour edging which gradually covers the whole flower. All three of tibouchinas are super-pretty, very photogenic - which is why we have so many photographs of them on our website!
Noelene grows to a fine flowering tree, around 6 metres tall, wide and rounded, with gorgeous smooth cinnamon-coloured bark. The flowers change from white buds through pale pink to dark pink as they open and mature, giving a very pretty effect in full flower.
Illusion has the same colour-changing properties as Noelene, in a smaller size ideal for hedging. This one will still reach over 2 metres around, for colourful privacy screening. Illusion flowers on and off throughout the year, completely covering the branches, and giving you great value.
Like the others, Chameleon blooms with white and pale pink and deep pink flowers, this time on a shrub that's under 2 metres all-round, small enough for growing in a large container or planting into a mixed flower bed with other pink and white blooms. Chameleon has two main seasons of flowering, spring and autumn, and often occasional flowers in between.
Tibouchinas For Foliage
With such gorgeous showy flowers for such a long season, it seems greedy to ask for more from these plants. But some tibouchina varieties are generous, and give lovely leaf colour along with those flowers. These varieties are worth planting for the flowers alone, which bloom mainly in autumn and through the year in sheltered spots.
Purple Star has arguably the brightest purple flowers of all the tibouchinas, warm-toned and richly coloured, as well as large-sized, and often with six petals instead of the usual five. Take a look at the new leaves growing, and you'll see they also have been brushed with a subtle glow of maroon-pink. For a plant less than two metres tall, Purple Star sure packs a lot of colour into a small space!
Fair warning, Elsa is rarely available and when she is she sells out almost immediately. That's because Elsa is one of the few all-white tibouchinas, so she's in high demand. If you're lucky enough to snag one, you'll also be able to enjoy her distinctive foliage - silvery grey, velvety and downy-soft, and edged in warm pink on every leaf. Those small white flowers with purple filaments appear in spring and autumn, on a large bush about 2-3 metres around, for a showy display.
Melodie is a brand new variety we are very happy to have in our range. It's got the classic big vibrant purple five-petalled flowers; it blooms heaviest in autumn. And it has bold leaves, each generously striped along the edges with contrast cream-yellow.
So even when the flowers aren't blooming (which isn't often) you've got lovely leaves to enjoy all year round. Melodie is a useful compact size full-grown, only a metre or so high, perfect for planters on the patio as well as showing off at the front of your flowerbeds.
Tibouchinas For Flowers
Lilac Time is a mutabilis hybrid like colour-changing Noelene, Illusion, and Chameleon, but this one keeps the same lilac-pink flower colour right through from bud to full bloom. The purple buds are encased in a bright red calyx which remains after the petals fall, so it does have a two-tone effect of its own! Lilac Time is a great hedging variety, and large feature shrub, ranging from 2-4 metres high and covered in flowers in the warmer months.
Jules is a fast grower and a fast bloomer; only a metre around but covered in big warm pink-purple flowers, reddish at the centre, through the warmer months. It flowers readily from tubestock size, and you can see on the product page images from our nursery paddocks of plants only a year or two old already a good size with heaps of flowers. Great for colourful results, quick smart!
Allure is the one to pick if you like the look of Lilac Time, and don't have the space for such a large shrub. Allure is a close relation, sharing a parent with Lilac Time, and topping out at around half the height, at around a metre tall. Happily, Allure often grows wider than tall, ideal for filling out a flowerbed, or filling up a planter on the deck, or creating a low row of hedging, at less cost. Soft pink-purple flowers appear in spring and autumn for even more great value. We can see the allure of this one!
Jazzie is our most popular tibouchina variety, compact and waist-high when grown in poor soils, cool climates, and containers;
reaching over head high in balmy climates, with regular rainfall, and a free root run in rich soil. Pink-red buds pop open into dark purple flowers with contrasting bright white filaments in the centre, from late summer to first frosts.
Plant this one where the sun shines through, and it glows magenta in the light.
Little Beauty is a great choice if you're stuck for space, can't squeeze another shrub into your flowerbeds, or only have a balcony to plant out. Less than a metre around, happy to grow in pots and planters, and flowering twice a year in spring and autumn to really earn its keep. Dark evergreen foliage and deep purple flowers make this a handsome variety too, ideal for low border hedging.
Climbing Tibouchina
More of a scrambler than a true twining climber, Skylab is unique among tibouchinas, which is why it gets its own section here! Give this variety a leg up - a pergola or chainlink fence to tie it to, or a taller shrub for it to cling to - and it will enthusiastically scramble skywards to over head height.The flowers are slightly smaller, but still large and showy, and intensely purple with bright gold anthers. In the cooler months, the distinctively crinkled downy leaves turn spicy shades of chili and nutmeg, for double the colour display.
Tibouchina Relatives
Tibouchinas are part of the Melastomataceae family, quite the mouthful to say!Fans of native shrubs might recognise the first part : Melastoma, the native bluetongue, is a distant cousin. There's over a hundred species of Melastoma found across India, southeast Asia, Japan, and the Pacific Islands.
One or two turn up in Australia, and they are the ones that we grow for our range.
So if you love the look of tibouchinas but you're a die-hard natives-only kind of gardener (or your local authority has very strict rules about what you can and can't plant) native Melastomas might be the shrubs for you. They make their Australian home on the east coast, in frost-free rainforest climates, and across the top end into WA's Kimberleys and the tip of Northern Territory. So Melastomas are very heat tolerant, and perhaps more drought tolerant than their lush flower and foliage would suggest.
They grow fast, and readily take root in disturbed soils in bushland, which make them great choice for establishing fast in gardens too. At around two metres high and wide, Melastomas quickly make a fine feature shrub and a colourful hedge. The flowers are smaller than most tibouchinas, and don't quite cover the bushes completely as tibouchina flowers do, but there's heaps of them in full bloom. Flowering occurs mainly in spring-summer, but local bushes here on the Sunshine Coast seem to bloom whenever the fancy takes them, in gentle pale purple, and all-white, both with a golden centre.
