Tag: bottle brush

Australia · clouds · colours · flowers · gardening · in my garden · Mount Warning · spring · subtropical weather · sunset · Tweed Valley

A Week of Flowers ~ Day 6

Joanne13 Comments

Cathy’s Week of Flowers at Words and Herbs is going way too fast. Here we are at Day 6 already! What is it they say … time goes fast when you’re having fun? This week certainly is fun. 🙂

Last year, I started choosing more drought tolerent plants for my garden. One of the first plants I chose was Gaura, which have adapted well to my subtropical garden which is rich in volcanic clay loam soil. I love the dainty flowers – and so do the bees! – so I planted more Gauras early this spring. This morning when I took these photos, my flower garden was abuzz with activity!

Some Daisies (but not all) are happy in my garden as well, and cope very well with the summer heat. Several years ago I planted this pretty lilac variety, and every once in a while I give them a harsh cutting back, usually when they try to take over the garden bed! In August, when this photo was taken, I had a patch of daisies about three metres long by two metres deep, and they looked just beautiful in full bloom! After the flowers had seen better days, I pulled out a few wayward runners and dead-headed the remaining plants. Within a week or two I expect to see the plants blooming profusely again.

My bottlebrush (Callistemon) is one of the first shrubs I planted in my garden after we built our house over 26 years ago, and it is still going strong. Callistemon is endemic to Australia, and a favourite with our small native honey-eating birds. This photo was taken in August as well, when the garden was springing to life after a brief winter rest.

Today the weather has been pleasantly warm and sunny, and in the early part of the day Mount Warning – the Cloud Catcher – lived up to its Indigenous name by “catching” a passing cloud.

Tonight, the darkening view across the valley, complete with orange sunset sky, looked equally as stunning.

Australia · birds · in my garden · Mount Warning · movies · native Australian birds · sunset · Tweed Valley · winter

A Day in the Garden

Joanne6 Comments

The valley looked a tad hazy today. I’m not sure why, but it just wasn’t as clear as usual.

Husband and I spent the day in the garden, weeding and mulching garden beds mostly. When we stopped for lunch, we ate on the front veranda and a Noisy Miner also stopped for lunch in the grevillea tree.

After lunch I checked on the bottle brush tree and a few young blooms are appearing. There are also stems that haven’t opened yet, but it’s looking pretty good considering it is still winter.

We have had this orchid in the garden for a few years now. I think my husband rescued it from a throw-out pile somewhere, and even though we don’t give it any special attention it always seems to be in flower.

This is also a flowering orchid – so husband tells me! We brought home heaps of potted orchids from around my inlaw’s garden when we tidied up the house for sale and for want of somewhere to put them, I shoved them on the ground under our large pine cone tree in our front garden. Now this orchid has flowered, yet I hardly even water them! I’m sure orchids must thrive on neglect.

It was just after 6pm when we came back into the house and the sky, just after sunset, looked pretty enough to take a photo.

While husband made dinner, I caught up on a bit more uni work, then we watched the James Bond movie Dr No. I have just finished reading the book for one of my uni units and seeing as I quite enjoyed the book, I thought I’d like to see the movie too. It was so different to the book though! It was well worth watching to see a rather gorgeous Sean Connery as Bond though. 🙂