"Janet Baraclough" wrote in message
...
The message
from "ste-m" contains these words:

Hi there,

When we moved into our house two years ago, there were small (like a foot
tall) green plants with spikey leaves in the front garden, which the
previous owners had recently planted.

Two years later, these small plants are now about 7-8 foot tall or more!


My Mum has a gardening book, and our plant looks similar to something
called
'Dragon Tree' (or 'Dracaena'), but our plant doesn't have a trunk as
such,
but has leaves sprouting from it from the ground up, so I thought this
might
be a slightly different species?

The photo can be found he http://tinyurl.com/q5gjt

Dracaena isn't hardy enough to have survived winters, and yucca
(which is) is rather slowgrowing in the UK.

From the pic, description and speed of growth, I think it's cordyline
australis, aka "cabbage palm". and "Torquay palm". They aren't cabbages
or palms but a lot of them grow in Torquay, and mature trees have the
exotic look of a palm.

If so, starting in a year or so the lower leaves will die and drop off
successively , leaving a bare very fibrous rough textured "trunk" with a
big head of fresh leaves at the top (and huge heads of tiny honey
scented flowers in summer) . They do grow fast in mild areas , I think
the tallest one here is around 40 ft . Higher than that and they tend to
get snapped by gales and start regrowing from the base.

However, you can easily keep them to a more manageable size by just
cutting off the trunk. New, multiple heads will sprout from below, often
making a branched plant with multiple heads. I don't think you're going
to want either shape growing that close to a window, unless the view out
is truly awful :-), and I wouldn't want the roots that close to the
house walls.

Moving them is hard work because even young plants quickly send out
enormous root systems. I moved two unwanted 5-footers from a neighbour's
garden to mine last year and it took two of us a good half day. One
died immediately, the other died at the top but the base resprouted this
spring and now has 5 strong new heads growing from the base.

If you just want an easy way out, you could saw it off at ground
level and apply a stump killer.

Janet.(Isle of Arran)

I will go with cordyline as well but if it's a cordyline then I don't think
it is australis because the leaves look a tad too broad. It certainly seems
to have a very thick trunk for an australis at this stage of growth and I
would have thought that the lower leaves would have died by now. Cordyline
indivisa perhaps.
Incidentally the word Dracaena gets used for cordylines and it is incorrect
but widely used.
"This tree was formerly called 'dracaena' - whence 'Dracaena Avenue' in
Falmouth in Cornwall"
http://www.habitas.org.uk/gardenflora/cordyline1.htm

Having said all that the taxonomy of these things seems a bit confusing.
Every time I see a Cordyline it looks slightly different to the last one I
saw,broader leaf, different rib colour or shade etc. I think there has been
a massive promiscuous going on at some stage:-)