Small Eucalyptus for Western Gardens

Tallerack (Eucalyptus tetragona). Author’s photographs, except as noted
The planting of a tree is a gift, which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root, it will far outlive the visible effects of any of your other actions, good or evil.
George Orwell, 1946
Four-winged mallee (Eucalyptus tetraptera). Original painting by Annette Filice

Of all the foreign trees that have affected our landscape, eucalypts are undoubtedly the foremost, but, since their introduction into the Western United States in the mid-1850s, they have suffered their fair share of controversy. They were brought from Australia, where all but a few species are endemic, to be grown as horticultural oddities for the nursery trade, then later as promising forestry trees and possible saviors of a forecasted timber drought. The promotion of the genus by private landholders, commercial firms, and state and federal agencies over the last 150 years has resulted in landscapes in the West that are dominated by only a few sp...