I have already written about this large native shrub Lomatia myricoides or River or Long-leaf Lomatia, please see the link below. This post is not so much about this Lomatia as a specimen plant but about its potential as a fabulous tall screening shrub.
I have found Lomatia myricoides to be extremely versatile in the garden in terms of its growing conditions. It will cope with shade, dry, humidity, temporary inundation to the root zone and a harsh prune.
It is this ability to cope with pruning which is making it one of my staples as a screening shrub, especially in part shade. It naturally has a dense multi-branching habit and can get quite wide if left alone, however if given a cut back it will begin to “hedge” very nicely and could even look quite tidy , if that was the look one was are after.
I have used it in a mixed screen planting along with other native shrubs like: Grevillea olivacea, Dodonaea ‘Mr Green Sheen’, Banksia ‘Sentinel’ and Leptopsermum ‘Seclusion’.
It can be quite slow growing to begin with but after a couple of years it takes off and before you know it you will have a privacy screen of a couple of metres or more. I find the more extra moisture it has the quicker the growth, which makes sense as it is sometimes called the River Lomatia.
The white Grevillea-like flowers appear in Summer through to Autumn and are attractive to Butterflies, bees and birds. The foliage can sometimes have a weeping habit and other times can be quite upright, as seen in the images above. The leaves also seem to have some variance in their width, depending whether the plant is seed grown and where the seed was collected from, I would classify the plant in the images of this post to be the narrow leaf variety, all are good for screening or hedging 😉
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