Start of Spring 2016

Lots of plants are waking up now that the weather is warming up.

A beautiful sign that spring is here is that all the cherry blossoms start appearing. Our street is lined with ornamental cherry trees so it always looks lovely in late August-September.

Surprisingly, our lotus plant which has been dormant all winter decided to produce a little leaf in early August. It has put up another miniature one since then but will probably take a bit warmer weather to really get going. Hopefully it will manage to flower this season.

We picked up a pack of Erlicheer jonquil bulbs for cheap in winter and potted them. As you can tell by the name, they are early bloomers and sprouted really quickly by the start of August.

By the end of August, the jonquils were blooming with many-petaled, creamy white flowers.

Here are the flowers close up. These also have a very strong fragrance.

We have now been living in this place for a year! Remember one of the first posts about our Chinese jasmine? I mentioned that we had cut it back, so that it's now just in the corner.

This week, the first flowers bloomed on the vine. We have come full circle!

Winter potted colour - Winter 2016

Various flowers that have brightened up the garden in winter 2016.

A whole selection, it was actually a very colourful winter. 

One that was extremely prolific were the purple and white/lavender pansies. The coral and yellow snapdragon also bloomed profusely for a while but we had some temperamental weather and it wasn't doing too well. We have since moved it to a different location and it is recovering and trying to flower again.

The pansies aboved were purchased as a small and cheap 'potted colour' and they completely took over the hanging basket and were blooming all through winter.

We even spotted some seeds and pansies are meant to be very good at self-seeding so maybe there will be some pleasant surprises next year.

The Fuchsia "Candy Lights" also started blooming in July/August. Very interesting flowers and a nice bright contrasting colour.

We managed to get a Kangaroo Paw (Anigozanthus Bush Pearl) for cheap and it flowered in early August with fuzzy pink spikes.

Our Westringia (Wynyabbie Gem) has also been flowering profusely all winter with small pale purple blooms all over.

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.