Hardiness zones
Sunset 8-24
USDA 8-11
Landscape Use: Low edging, formal hedge to small multiple-trunk tree. A versatile plant with many landscape uses that are mostly cultivar specific. Ergo, know your cultivar differences!
Form & Character: Highly versatile evergreen shrub, low mounding to upright small tree, spreading and pendulous, peeling cinnamon-brown trunk is very attractive. In the Phoenix area common myrtle is an old fashioned, traditional landscape shrub for mesic landscape design motifs.
Growth Habit: Dwarf cultivars 3' to 15' for species
Foliage/texture: Medium green simple leaf, lanceolate and sessile to 1", distinctly aromatic, fine to medium fine texture
Flowers & fruits: Small cream-white flowers arising from auxiliary flower buds followed by small black drupe-like fruit in Summer and Fall
Seasonal color: Cream-white flowers in April-May
Temperature: Hardy to 10oF
Light: Partial to full sun
Soil: Iron chlorosis will develop in highly alkaline, wet soil conditions, and I don't recommend use of common myrtle if the soil is > 8.3. Soil must be well drained. If chlorsis occurs because of high soil alkalinity, then regularly treat with elemental sulfur and use ammoniacal forms of nitrogen fertilizer to help lower soil pH.
Watering: Takes some drought in Phoenix, but respond best to regular though not frequent deep waterings.
Pruning: Common myrtle responds well to any type of pruning. Large specimens are trained into beautirful multiple trunk trees, whereas dwarf cultivars are sheared with great success into formal shapes.
Propagation: Cutting or seed
Disease and pests: Rare outbreaks of spider mites during the summer are the only problem this plant ever seems to have in Phoenix.
Additional comments: One of the more serviceable and versatile shrubs in Southwest landscapes for mesic landscape designs. Common myrtle makes a great formal hedge plant (hint, hint for all you people who like landscape boxes, beer kegs and bowling balls). Myrtle is the perfect firewood. Cultivated varieties include:
The bark and roots are used to tan the finest Turkish and Russian leather to which it imparts a delicate scent. Common myrtle has a notable Biblical tradition.
“Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree.” - Isaiah 55:13
