Last week I found a tree in someone’s front garden that had me stopping the car once again & getting out for a closer look. It was a New Zealand Christmas tree (Metrosideros excelsus). It is also known as the Pohutukawa tree.
Amazing that such a colourful bird can blend in so well
The tree was festooned with flowers with hundreds more yet to bloom. The Lorikeets were all over it, so this is a great tree if you like birds. Each flower is quite large at around 3 cms & like Red Flowering Gums, they grow in clusters at around 12 cms wide. The flowers are deep rich red. The tree flowers a number of times a year with the main flowering season from November to February.
The New Zealand Christmas tree is an evergreen tree that can reach a height of between 7 – 10 metres in ideal conditions with a dense canopy of up to 7-metres wide. The leaves are a dark grayish-green with white ‘hair’s’ underneath & are 3-5 cms long, just enough to hide a Lorikeet or 10.
It handles pruning & is disease, pest, wind & salt tolerant. It is also drought tolerant once established & grows well in coastal areas.
It would make an excellent street tree & a whole street with these trees in flower would look wonderful. All that red would be quite striking when the trees were in flower. The only downfall is that they can develop significant roots when mature, so it is definitely a case of plant it in the right place.
Some people are purists when it comes to wanting only Australian natives. My opinion is that if a tree provides food for nectar-eating birds, then it is beneficial to the environment. The New Zealand Christmas tree certainly provides food for birds which they love. It also provides a dense canopy offering safety & shelter, which is important, especially for smaller birds.
I certainly think that the New Zealand Christmas tree would be a good choice in Marrickville LGA. It would be good to have some bold colours here & there.
You can grow the New Zealand Christmas tree from seeds, which are available from most nurseries. I think it’s the tree world equivalent of a super model on par with the Red Flowering Gum.
close-up of the flowers of the New Zealand Christmas tree
SAVING OUR TREES - Marrickville municipality 
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November 17, 2010 at 9:52 pm
Melanie
As you know all the Figs at our end of Cavendish Street are going. Perhaps this would be a nice replacement.
My Mum lives in Perth near the beach and they are the street trees there – we love the one at our family home – here are some of her thoughts:
Yes very interesting. It certainly is a very beautiful tree but of course people here don’t like to lose their ocean views and every new house seems to be allowed to cut them down. They tend to replace them with nothing or else with “in” trees like olives. The New Zealand Christmas tree is a very hardy and salt and drought-tolerant tree which grows easily in sandy soil near the beach. I have quite a few in pots that self-seeded all the way from our front yard to pots in our backyard with something else growing in them. Birds do love them and a honey-eater family is visiting flowers on the one in a pot near our front door. They don’t drop annoying bits and are evergreen not deciduous. They also have aero-phagic roots which hang down in clumps which some people find ugly.