Cordyline australis 'Burgundy Spire'

9x9 cm

€8,00

Cordyline australis 'Burgundy Spire'

€8,00

Organic

Sustainable

Locally grown

🪴Standard: 9x9 cm pot

🚂 Ships across EU

🌱 Grown without pesticides or UV lamps

Flower Color: White

Preferred Soil Type: Well-drained

Sunlight: Full sun

Hardiness Zone: Zone 9: -1.1°C to -6.7°C

Origine: New Zealand

Cordyline australis 'Burgundy Spire' is a cultivar of the New Zealand cabbage tree, selected for its deep burgundy-purple, strap-shaped leaves held in an upright rosette.

The foliage is composed of long, narrow, sword-shaped leaves in a rich chocolate-burgundy color that maintains its vibrancy all year.

In New Zealand it produces white flowers with white fruit but it is very uncommon in our more temperate regions.

The shape is beautiful as it shifts from an upright, spiky fountain shaped adolescence into a clustered stem of maturity.

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Cordyline australis belongs to the family Asparagaceae (subfamily Lomandroideae) and is endemic to New Zealand, where it's known as tī or tī kōuka. In the wild it grows into a tall, branching tree up to 20 metres high, with a stout trunk and sword-like leaves up to a metre long clustered at the branch tips.

Mature trees produce large clusters of small, sweetly scented white flowers, followed by whitish berries that are an important food source for native birds such as korimako (bellbird), tūī, and kererū.

Tī kōuka held real practical importance in traditional Māori life.

The root and stem, particularly of young trees, were cooked and eaten as a valued food source called kauru — in parts of the South Island this involved coppicing the trees on a multi-year rotation and steaming the harvested stems for around 24 hours in dedicated earth ovens (umu tī) to convert the plant's starches into sugar.

The tough, durable leaves were also a key weaving material, used to make baskets, sandals (paraerae), rope, snares, rain capes, and carrying straps (kawe), since the fibre notably doesn't shrink in water - making it useful for things like anchor ropes and fishing-net reinforcement.

The leaves were also used medicinally, brewed as a tea for diarrhoea and dysentery. Long-lived and distinctive, cabbage trees were also traditionally planted to mark trails, boundaries, and burial grounds (urupā).