Backyard & hedge favourites
Tulip Tree
Liriodendron tulipifera
The tulip tree carries the easiest leaf in this whole guide: once you've seen its squared-off shape, like a maple leaf with the tip cut flat, you'll never mistake it again. Larger gardens in Hawthorn, Kew and Camberwell grew them as feature trees, and they get big: this is a tree that outgrows small blocks.
How to spot a tulip tree
Leaves
Four broad lobes with a flat, notched top edge, as if the leaf tip was cut off with scissors. Bright green, turning butter yellow in autumn. Unique among Melbourne's trees.
Flowers
Tulip-shaped cups of pale green petals with an orange band at the base, in late spring. They sit high in the crown facing upward, so most people only notice them once they drop.
Form
Tall, straight-trunked and fast growing, comfortably passing 20 metres in a garden. Young trees are neatly conical; old trees develop long clear trunks.
Bark
Grey with shallow, regular interlacing furrows, a bit like an ash but on a much straighter stem.
Season
One of the cleanest golden-yellow autumn displays in the east, dropping over a short window.
Where you'll see it around the south east
Established gardens and parks in Hawthorn, Kew, Camberwell and Canterbury, usually as a single feature tree planted decades ago that now towers over the house. Occasionally seen as a street tree on wider nature strips.
Worth knowing
It's not related to tulips: the tulip tree is a member of the magnolia family from eastern North America, where it grows into one of the tallest hardwoods on the continent. The flowers are rich in nectar, and bees work a flowering crown hard through late spring.
Easily confused with
Maples and planes have pointed-lobed leaves; the tulip tree's flat-topped leaf rules them out instantly. In winter, the straight trunk and neat furrowed bark can suggest an ash, but the buds are flattened like a duck's bill, another tell unique to this tree.
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