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William & Griselda Kerr
Tom Christian (2021)
Recommended citation
Christian, T. (2021), 'Eucryphia × hillieri' from the website Trees and Shrubs Online (treesandshrubsonline.
An evergreen tree to 10 m tall, leaves usually pinnate with 3–5(–9) leaflets, glaucous beneath, margins entire, the terminal leaflet always largest, narrowly oblong-elliptic, to 6 × 1.5 cm, lateral leaflets oblong, to 3 × 1 cm. Leaf apices rounded or shortly mucronate, mucro to 2 mm. Solitary, white cup-shaped flowers to 3.5 cm across are borne in mid-late summer. (Cullen et al. 2011).
USDA Hardiness Zone 8b-11
RHS Hardiness Rating H5
A hybrid between the ‘mainland’ Australian Eucryphia moorei and the Tasmanian E. lucida, which was described from a self-sown plant found in Hillier’s Chandlers Ford nursery in 1953. This original cross was propagated and distributed under the cultivar name ‘Winton’ and it is this clone that is now in general cultivation.
It most closely resembles E. moorei from which it can generally be distinguished by its shorter and broader lateral leaflets which are usually fewer in number. From other pinnate-leaved species and hybrids it can be distinguished in the following ways: by its entire margins (toothed in E. glutinosa); by its glaucous undersides (pale grey-green in E. × intermedia); by its small terminal leaflets to 6 × 1.5 cm (to 12 × 3.5 cm in E. × splendens).
A tree grown as ‘Winton’ had, by 2012, reached 9 m × 26 cm dbh at Achamore on the Isle of Gigha, on the west coast of Scotland, and another specimen at Castlewellan, Northern Ireland, was 14 m when last measured in 2015, but this is not attributed to ‘Winton’ and so may descend from a separate hybridisation event (The Tree Register 2018).
This is a very attractive hybrid, hardier than its E. moorei parent, and it deserves to be more widely planted.
Discussed in the entry for E. × hillieri.