There are some who think that even considering growing a macadamia tree in your backyard is more than slightly nutty. Macadamia trees supposedly die in the frost.
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They can also fill an average backyard, with a few branches left over to invade next door.
Except we have a macadamia that has not just survived, but thrived, even when it's gone down to -9 ºC. I didn't expect it to – like many of our trees, including the banana that is stubbornly fruiting right now outside the bathroom, with what looked like frost –blackened bananas now turning green and fat – I planted the macadamia seedling expecting it to die. And then it didn't.
'Seedling' is possibly the important word here. I grew it from a nut, foraged on a bushwalk up in northern NSW, instead of buying a nice neat sapling. The parent tree was a 'fringe rainforest' one growing on the edges of true rainforest, peering out from dappled shade. By luck instead of judgment, I must have found a frost-resistant tree.
That was about 25 years ago. Back then the only macadamias available in nurseries were Macadamia angustifolia and a variety bred in Hawaii from Australian stock to give lots of fat, easily cracked nuts. Well, somewhat easily cracked – macadamias evolved to be the only naturally growing substance ever known to defeat the beaks of white cockatoos.
I've never tried to find out exactly who my macadamia is. (It's now the parent of at least half a dozen smaller trees). I suspect it's Macadamia tetraphylla, more frost resistant than angustifolia but in the last decade plant collectors have been mooching about southern Queensland and Northern NSW and have reported the discoveries of at least another dozen kinds of macadamia, with varying growing habits.
Plant breeders have and are still working on the most productive and hardy of their offspring as well as promising hybrids. A friend's backyard macadamia was bought at the nursery three years ago as a hybrid of both tetraphylla and angustifolia, combing the best properties of both, and is already showing long racemes of flowers that hopefully will develop in an excellent crop of nuts.
Ours is certainly hardy. Productive? Sort of. It reliably gives about three nuts a day, every day of the year, in drought summers or rainy winters. This is excellent for backyard nibblers like us, especially if you want to be able to let visiting kids pick their own nuts. It would be of no use whatsoever for anyone who wants a decent commercial crop – they'd want lots, produced in a short time, not a dribble throughout out the year.
Our nuts' shells are also tough, even for macadamias.
As far as I know no visiting white cockatoo has even had a go at cracking one, seeming to know instinctively that their beaks would give out before the macadamia shells. No bush rat has ever nibbled them, unlike the chestnuts and almonds. They either get harvested by us, then cracked with our trusty heavy mallet or the specialised macadamia cracker Bryan bought me a few Christmases ago, or nestle into the leaves below the tree and eventually turn into macadamia seedlings, to be given away or planted elsewhere.
And the tree is big. It is also growing bigger, and may continue to do so long after I am gone. But I learned a few months ago that macadamias can not just as successfully be pruned into a neat hedge, but they can even become a neat nut-producing hedge, as long as you train them young and haul out the secateurs at least twice a year.
The macadamia hedge I saw was surprisingly attractive – the pruning had coaxed it into producing its leaves far closer together, possibly in a desperate attempt to survive.
Its owners prune everything in their garden to similar neat shapes: azaleas, bay trees, camellias, lemon verbena … the macadamia had possibly sensed that any plant that failed to be obedient would be chucked.
Which means, basically, that if you hunt for the right variety of macadamia you can grow one anywhere in Australia, as long as the soil is well drained and you give it some dappled shade and frost protection for the first three to seven years – the warmer the climate and the more food and water it gets the sooner it will establish. Beware of too much mulch – if it collects around the stem the bark can rot, killing the tree. And if you plan to prune it, begin when the tree is young.
In return you will get nuts – delicious, nutritious, and great fun to crack, one of the few foods where you probably use twice the number of calories getting through the nut and into the flesh inside the shell than you ingest by eating the kernel.
And if you have ever wanted revenge on the white cockatoos for eating your sunflowers or even your red cedar veranda, grow a macadamia tree. Cosset it, enjoy its nuts fruit ... and watch the white cockatoos gazing at it helplessly, defeated.
This week I am:
- still eating asparagus, asparagus and asparagus, and discovering that the purple asparagus planted two years ago is already producing great fat spears, more tender and less fibrous than the usual green ones;
- glorying in white and yellow banksia roses;
- planting red and white Federation daisy bushes, the modern double varieties which aren't as hardy as the now rare old-fashioned singles that finally died of old age before I had time to take some cuttings;
- still about to plant the beans I didn't plant last week, and the corn seedlings, and some more cucumbers and white colossal asparagus seedlings which I hope live up to their name;
- wondering if the carrot, pea and radish seedlings are ever going to emerge; and
- watching the dahlias poke their heads up. If I remember to feed and water them, they'll be blooming by Christmas. If I don't, they'll flower anyway, about two or three weeks later.
