You would have to be deeply puritanical to resist the charms of a good eucalyptus tree – the marbled, peeling bark, the glittery dancing foliage in summer and winter, the clusters of white flowers and “landmine” seed cases. Eucalyptus trees have it all.

So why is it that so many gardeners in this country claim to hate them? Too fast and tall, they say, blissfully unaware that some hardy eucalyptuses are only bushes. Aliens, they call them; unsuited to the British landscape. In fact, they are very well suited to the dry conditions many of us have been experiencing in recent years, and technically they are no more foreign than chestnuts or sycamores.

Plenty of books will tell you that eucalyptus trees are tender. That’s because the first specimens brought to the UK came from coastal collections where temperatures never dropped below freezing. But those for sale in the UK today are from trees that grow at higher altitudes and can survive regular winter frosts. Some eucalyptuses have withstood temperatures of -17C in County Durham, so tenderness is generally not a problem.

Five years ago in Queensland I drove through dry uplands, where nothing rose above the parched land but the odd hump-backed cow, termite mounds and some scraggy 20ft eucalyptuses. They were ancient trees of a species whose branches the Aborigines used to tap to find hollow lengths for their didgeridoos.

It’s this drought tolerance that is most useful to us. Once they have had two to three months to establish (when they will need watering), hardy eucalyptuses will sail through the driest times Britain can offer. If anything, they are the better for it, because in our moist, fertile soils they are inclined to grow fast and become unstable. That’s why it’s important to plant them small – roughly knee-high – so that the top does not get out of sync with the roots.

You will often see eucalyptuses bent or even pushed over by the wind, and that’s because they were planted too large and were pot-bound, and so never made an adequate root system. There is however a happier side to these lurchings; sometimes the tree survives on its elbow to give you a truly picturesque view of its remarkable bark. It also makes new vertical trunks from the base because most eucalyptuses have a “lignotuber” (a kind of swelling) just under the soil, from which the plant can naturally regenerate after fire. Too big for our gardens? Well, they can be. If you plant a tall species near a house and on clay, you are inviting trouble with foundations.

But you can, of course, keep it pollarded, in which case its roots and canopy will be smaller and so will the amount of water drawn from the soil. Another way to keep it shorter is by cutting out the leader when it’s a sapling, so that it develops into a multi-stemmed tree. There are also naturally smaller, sometimes even shrubby species, know as mallees, whose bark and leaf can be just as attractive as those of the larger varieties.

Eucalyptuses are more or less immune to pests and diseases, which is another bonus. The real downside of them in gardens is that, like all evergreen trees, they drop their old leaves in summer, which can be messy in the wrong place, and their hungry roots draw water all year, which means the soil beneath is always dry and starved. In the right place it doesn’t matter; if you wanted to grow woodland perennials it would matter.

Up in the wilds of North Wales Andrew McConnell, ex- wholefood retailer and agriculturalist, has a mission not just to sell hardy eucalyptuses but to sell them semi-mature. At his Celyn Vale Nursery he grows them in mesh bags in the ground, which produce a wonderfully fibrous, transplantable root system. The tops are then carefully pruned to make attractive multi-stemmed trees. The big Italian nurseries are copying him, which is certainly a change.

McConnell is proud to say that most of his seeds are especially collected for maximum hardiness at high altitudes in Tasmania and Victoria. And, believe me, trees have to be hardy to survive in his mountain-top nursery. In my Essex garden, E. aggregata is so tough that it never actually stops growing through the winter, only holding back in frosty spells. To keep it at around 25ft the whole tree has a major coiffure every March, when I take out dozens of 10ft branches as fat as your wrist. They go straight through the shredder to make a fragrant mulch for shady paths. A month later you can’t even see the tree has been pruned.

Stockists of eucalyptus trees: Celyn Vale Nursery, Corwen, Denbighshire (01490 430671; www.eucalyptus.co.uk)
Chew Valley Trees, Chew Magna, Bristol (01275 333752; www.chewvalleytrees.co.uk)
Raven Valley Plant Nursery, Woking, Surrey (01483 234605; www.plantexperience.co.uk)

Pick A eucalyptus

Remarkable bark: E. debeuzevillei, niphophila, pauciflora
Green foliage: E. dalrympleana, nicholii, subcrenulata
Hardiest: E. debeuzevillei, niphophila, pauciflora
Small gardens: E. gregsoniana, kybeanensis, vernicosa
Wet ground: E. aggregata, gunnii divaricata, stellulata
Lime tolerant: E. dalrympleana, macarthurii, parvifolia Salt tolerant: E. debeuzevillei, niphophila, pauciflora

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