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.

Woolie's Bougainvillea

This bright bougainvillea was an impulse purchase from our local Woolworths in spring 2015.

It had masses of flowers when first purchased and these lasted for a bit.

Perhaps it was over-fertilised to give so many blooms, eventually the plant withered away.

However, it managed to come back to life after a while and started flowering again in late summer.

It then kept going throughout winter and into autumn 2016. A nice pop of colour in the garden for quite a bit of the year.

Veg and Herbs - January, March, May 2016

A selection of green growing plants from the garden in the first half of 2016.

The radishes were left too long in the ground with not enough space so we got some very interesting shapes. Unfortunately not edible by the time they were dug out.

We had a bit more luck with the tomatoes and okra. These were just purchased as small seedlings from Bunnings and grew up in an old wheelbarrow.

It produced some very nice okra and we saved some seeds for spring.

The basil also did very well and is still growing happily into winter with lots of small white flowers.