Tulipwood, the native street tree specifiers keep overlooking

Ask for a native street tree in south east Queensland and the same few names come back. Tulipwood, Harpullia pendula, is rarely one of them. On a good share of the briefs that cross this desk, evergreen, moderate in scale, well mannered at the roots, tolerant of pavement and heat, it would have been the right answer and nobody put it on the list.

What the tree actually is

Harpullia pendula belongs to the Sapindaceae, and comes from rainforest and rainforest margins along coastal Queensland and northern New South Wales. It is evergreen, with pinnate leaves of glossy dark leaflets and a bronze flush on the new growth. In closed forest it draws up tall and straight. Grown in the open it makes a single clean trunk under a fairly dense rounded crown with a slight weep at the tips, and in a street it usually settles somewhere around six to ten metres with a spread to match. The timber is the striped black and yellow cabinet wood that gave the tree its name, which is worth knowing because the tulipwood of the furniture trade is a different tree from the Americas and the names get muddled constantly.

Where it earns its place

• Scale. It sits inside the envelope most street plantings need, so it is not being cut back into a stump every few years to clear a footpath or a service run. A tree that fits does not need managing.
• Roots. Fine and well behaved, with no reputation for lifting kerbs or breaking slabs. That alone rules a lot of handsome natives out of a verge.
• Heat and pavement. Rainforest in origin, but once established it takes full sun, reflected heat off bitumen and a restricted root zone without sulking.
• Density. Evergreen, so shade in summer and screening the rest of the year, and the foliage holds in wind rather than shredding.
• Manners. No suckering, sound wood, low limb drop, no serious pest that follows it around.

The honest caveats: it is frost tender while young, so in cold country give a young tree a couple of protected winters, though a tree already at specimen size is a far tougher proposition. It resents waterlogging, so a clay hole with no drainage will kill it slowly. And growth is moderate rather than quick, which is exactly the argument for putting one in at size rather than waiting a decade. Our note on choosing your size covers that trade.

The fruit is the reason to think about where it goes

The capsules ripen orange to yellow, two lobed, and split open to show glossy black seed. They sit on the tree for weeks and they are the best thing about it. They also fall. Over turf, a mulched verge or a median, that is nothing at all. Over angle parking, pale exposed aggregate, light pavers, an outdoor dining area or a pool surround, the capsules and seed become a maintenance item and can mark a pale surface. Birds take the seed and add their own contribution to the same square metres.

Two things to know before you plan around the fruit. Cropping is uneven from tree to tree, so a row will not fruit as one, and you cannot promise a client either the display or the absence of it. And the seed is not something to encourage children to collect, so a heavy cropper directly over a playground is a conversation you can avoid by moving it ten metres.

How it compares with the other natives on the same brief

Brush box is the default, and deservedly so where there is room: bigger, tougher, coarser, and it will grow straight past a clearance envelope if you ask it to live under wires. Tuckeroo covers similar ground at similar scale with real coastal salt tolerance, but the foliage is heavier and it fruits too. Ivory curl flower gives you the flowering display and wants shelter and better soil to do it. Weeping lilly pilly is a bigger, thirstier tree that earns its keep as screen or avenue rather than as a street tree over pavement. Tulipwood sits between them: smaller than brush box, more refined than tuckeroo, harder wearing in exposure than ivory curl, and better mannered underground than most things its size. What you can see of the range is under street and avenue trees and Australian natives.

Where not to use it

Do not reach for tulipwood when the brief is a wide shade canopy over a carpark, because it will never be that tree. Do not put it into a severe frost hollow as a young plant. Do not use it in deep shade, where it draws up thin and loses the crown shape that makes it worth having. And do not put it where fruit litter is genuinely intolerable, because the tree is not going to stop.

If you have a street or a driveway brief with clearance limits and a client who wants a native, send through the widths, the services, what is overhead and what the surface underneath is made of, and we will tell you honestly whether tulipwood is the tree for it or whether something else in the range fits better. Our contact page is the quickest way through.