a, both being terminal flowering and sharing some other characteristics. Being closer to Angophora, it was either include everything within the one genus of Eucalyptus, or split off the bloodwoods and create a separate group for them sitting in between Angophora and Eucalyptus.
Which brings me to the genetic improvement of the red flowering gum, a brilliant but unreliable species, in the genetic sense that you don’t know what you’re getting! One of the more amazing projects that I’ve seen in my career as a plant breeder happened up in Queensland. A fellow by the name of Stan Henry, a retired horticulturist, wanted to grow a red flowering gum in his home garden but he was in the humid climate of coastal central Queensland. He watched a number of his Corymbia ficifolia die from the heat and humidity, and from the leaf spot that they tend to get when they’re grown in Sydney and further north (you can grow them but they look very ratty and not a good garden specimen).
The strategy that he then chose was to hybridise Corymbia ficifolia, the red flowering gum from around Albany in south-west Western Australia with the swamp bloodwood, Corymbia ptychocarpa from northern Australia, which has the same spectacular terminal flowers common to all the Corymbias, but is obviously much better equipped to cope with the humidity and heat of northern Australia. By crossing those two species together, we get a group of hybrids which has been marketed as the Summer series – ‘Summer Red’, ‘Summer Beauty’ and ‘Summer Snow’, a white variety. By and large it’s been quite a successful series when planted in gardens up and down the east coast, from Melbourne through to Queensland. Hybridisation is one way to go, and I like to think of what he’s done as a wonderful reconciliation, a sort of ‘east meets west’, between the swamp bloodwood from the east and north east and, from the other corner of the continent right down in the south-west, the red flowering gum. That’s where I think plant breeding really does have a place in modern horticult