GARDENS : Hedging Your Bets : As a Bush, Border or Even a Tree, the Versatile Eugenia Is a Sure Thing
EVERYONE calls them eugenias except botanists, who, in what must have been a fit of pique, renamed them Syzygiums some time back. The plant, of course, didn’t change; it’s still one of the most useful of shrubs. In Australia, its native land, eugenia grows in the wild to well over 50 feet. In Southern California, 30 feet is more likely, and 20 more typical. It can, however, be kept quite narrow--as a hedge it is admirably suited, because it grows tall and lean, taking up no more than three or four feet.
Its small glossy leaves are a distinct reddish-bronze; very few plants are similarly colored. The leaves are small enough so that when a hedge of eugenia is sheared, you do not notice the partially cut leaves that remain. Leaves also grow so close together that it is impossible to see through the plant even when it is quite young. Eugenias can grow in some shade, a definite plus, but they are then less dense.
The fruit, a striking purple, is “edible, but insipid,” as “Sunset New Western Garden Book” succinctly puts it. Most children find this out very quickly and instead use the fruit as missiles. Adults learn that the fruit can stain paving a bright purple--and so are usually quicker to sweep it up. Sunset advises: “Don’t plant where dropping fruit will squish on pavement.”
A new variety of eugenia--which was named ‘Chiquita’ but is now named ‘Teenie Genie’ for legal reasons--is so small and grows so slowly that progress is imperceptible. It is said to grow to about four feet, but in my own garden, after four years, the plants are still barely a foot tall and less than a foot and a half across. They make perfect little balls of reddish-green foliage; they have never flowered and so have no fruit. I use them much like the Japanese would smooth, round rocks. They are the very stable anchors in a bed of herbs and other miscellany and would make a handsome little bordering hedge, such as those used in period gardens.
It is also possible to go the opposite route--to consider the common eugenia a tree after all and to trim and train it as such. The eugenias pictured here were planted by eugenia fancier Ed Lau to make a little grove beside a friend’s house. Like very large bonsai, they were trimmed so the branching pattern is more open and obvious, and the effect of a forest can be experienced in a very small space.
There are two other dwarf varieties. ‘Compacta’ can grow to 10 feet and has become the standard for property-line hedges; ‘Globulus’ is shorter still, to perhaps eight feet, and it is a rounder shrub, as the name suggests. Expect about a foot or so of growth a year, from either, at first. Usually sold in five-gallon nursery cans, they are a little over two feet tall. For it to grow into a six-foot fence will take four years. If this seems painfully slow, remember that gardening was invented to teach us all patience; that many years down the road, these compact eugenias will require much less pruning and will be easier to keep dense and full than their brethren.
