Bits of greenery

Just some photos of things growing.

After wet weather, these appeared.

Growing a baby succulent from leaf.

On the windowsill, we have some algae balls. When there's sunlight, they produce little bubble of oxygen which are the bright circles in the photo.

Our Buddleia "Spring Promise" which is meant to be a butterfly/bird-attracting plant. It started producing plenty of spikes in early July but suddenly shriveled up in August. Not sure if this will recover at the moment.

Our native wattle, Acacia cognata "Green Magik" started producing lots of little buds all along its branches. We are currently waiting to see what develops.

Garden Centre Camellias

I took a few photos for future reference while we were visiting garden centres this autumn/winter.

Early May - Camellia sasanqua Early Pearly

Early June - Camellia japonica Betty Ridley

Early June - Camellia japonica Debbie

Early July - Camellia japonica Emperor of Russia

Our Camellias - Autumn/Winter 2016

We collected a few camellias of varying sizes and they put on a beautiful show this winter. So there are going to be a lot of photos in this post!

The first one to flower was our Camellia sasanqua Paradise Caroline. 

Here's one of the flowers just starting to open. Paradise Caroline produces a deep pink, informal double flowers, a bit more on the small side.

Very beautiful, almost peony-form flowers. Flowers last a few days after blooming before slowly losing petals. The good thing is that the buds bloomed in a staggered fashion so there was always some colour on the tree. This one started blooming in April all the way to July.

This is one of the last blooms produced, a really massive, many-petaled camellia!

We also had some very young camellias, and this one is Camellia sasanqua Something Special, a white and pink semi-double. This one is larger than Paradise Caroline and dwarfed the plant itself when it produced a single bloom at the end of May.

Unfortunately we had some very wet weather at the time and the flower did not last very long. Hopefully it will do better next year.

Another more advanced plant was this Camellia sasanqua Fairy Wand. We purchased this early in autumn and there were already plenty of buds, but this variety only started flowering in late July.

As the name suggests, it produces small dark pink flowers in a semi-double form.

Extremely prolific flowering, the tree was just covered in blooms. Compared to Paradise Caroline, Fairy Wand loses its blooms whole and the ground beneath the plant was equally covered in dropped flowers.

You can see how many blooms there were on each stem, with plenty more buds waiting to flower. It has continued to flower up to the end of winter.

Finally, a strange result. This is meant to be Camellia sasanqua Jennifer Susan - a soft pink semi-double. Somehow when it bloomed in early August, it was a white single. We'll see what happens next year.

Winter colour - Begonia, cyclamen, anthurium

Going into winter, we were worried that the garden would not be as colourful as it had been in spring/summer. However, there are plenty of flowers that bloom in the cold season.

The begonias are putting on quite a show and look quite nice in their rectangle planter.

Our anthurium lilies are all blooming as well. This plant produces smallish blooms in a nice rich red colour.

We also have a rose pink cyclamen which is flowering very profusely at the moment. So winter is still quite a colourful time in our garden.

Fruit trees - Passionfruit, mango, papaya, guava

 A few fruiting plants that are growing in our garden at the moment. It may be a while before we get any produce from them but they are doing very well.

Passionfruit from Bunnings that is obediently curling around the supports provided. Sometimes you need to guide the plant back where you want it to grow, but they do a good job of hanging on.

You can see the passionfruit in the background here. In front is our mango tree which has been growing well since it was properly established.

A red papaya tree grown from seed. We saved a handful of seeds from a delicious papaya and chose the best seedling to plant in the ground.

Some new leaves growing from a young Indian guava tree. The new shoots seem to be tasty to pests so we have netting strung over this tree to protect it.