Thank you!! xo

hey welcome to GW .... first.. see link next.. is your product labeled for monthly use?? and that aside.. the mature ones are impervious to any treatment with their waxy coating.. and you must ID when the babes crawl out and are susceptible to the oil ... and that is once a year .. not monthly ... you are wasting product/money.. if nothing else ... third.. ants are usually around.. to 'milk' honeydew from whatever it is ... they are irrelevant to it all ... and the black is usually a mold as a result of the honeydew ... in other words.. get rid of the scale.. the ants will move on.. and sooner or later the mildew will go away ... the real problem.. is that the mature ones.. look no different if they are dead or alive.. just because you kill them.. doesnt mean they are going to disappear ... and frankly.. when it comes to this point.. i usually have a hard time 'looking' at them for years to come ... and it is then i think about cutting them down ... now i know nothing about this plant.. as i didnt even know it existed before your post ... but if it is like many hedges or flowering shrubs.. there is probably no reason you couldnt cut them to near ground level.. remove EVERYTHING.. treat the stumps for remnants of scale ... and within a few months.. just about have your hedge back .. since there is no insult to the root mass ... and in the meanwhile.. have removed 99.99% of the problem ... [i would burn it.. and find some satisfaction in sending them to the Elysian fields ...funeral pyre and all that ..]... hopefully you can find out if rejuvenation pruning' is an option with this plant .. good luck ken Here is a link that might be useful: link

Possibly scale, check the branches and see if there's a little, hard, bug infestation that's hard to remove, though you can flick them off with your finger nail sometimes. If there is, there's also likely to be ants travelling up and down the tree, they 'milk' the scales for their secretions. 'White' oil is the treatment - it chokes the bug and prevents it from sucking. You should also apply a ring of petroleum jelly around the base of the bush to stop the ants. I sometimes use a commercial insecticide but a lot of gardeners believe that's a no, no, now-a-days on account of possible damage to friendly insects.

If you're looking for a lilly-pilly/ syzygium of no more than medium height, you couldn't go past Acmena smithii minor 'cherry surprise', which is a particularly lovely one to 2 to 3 metres. It's an attractive deep green in colour, with pink to red tips. Another lovely one, though perhaps not as hardy, is Acmena variegata, which grows to 3 metres. Nice, natural shape, dense in leaf. There' also a number of syzygiums worth considering, just make sure they are psysilid resistant. In fact there is one on the market named 'Resilence'. Worth a try. B