@sintra said:
my component is made up of a number of components within components ould this make a difference.
Yes, definitely!
In my suggestion I really meant simple, raw geometry. If you enter into the parent component's context only, then either a right to left or a left to right selection will only select the nested (child) components only.
So I have looked into your linked file and saw that there are only two components within the parent component; the leaves and the stem
Now what you can do, is to enter the context of an instance of each of these two components and do the above operation in each separately.
On a side note; while this shrub seems to be nice, it is etremely high poly and way too big in file size as well. Also, what I noticed, the images on the leaves are cluttered and since the leaves themselves are not instances of the same component, this would be rather tiresome to fix.
This also counts for the very big file size however.