Summer round up - 2

Princess lilies – For my birthday this year, Anshuman gifted me a new plant called Princess Lily. It has nice white flowers, with slight pink and cream streaks though it. Even the leaves are lovely, with a nice white border. Once the flowers die down in autumn, the plant still looks striking. It needs a partly shady spot, so I put it under the Hakea.

Princess Lillies

Cactus - Last post I was looking forward to a cactus flower. It did have several flowers, surprisingly very dainty for such a prickly plant! Only the purple cactus flowered. The red and yellow had no change from the last year. In fact the stem of the yellow one seems to be rotting, even though I never water it.

Cactus flower

Crepe Myrtle – This is one of my absolute favourites! I envy the people who have this growing in their yards. When full grown, the tree is 8 ft tall or so. The branches are quite linear, fanning out from the trunk. This gives a spectacularly organised effect when they have flowers growing at the end. So far, I have seen various shades of pink, light purple and white. They only flower for a month in February-March, so they are much looked forward to.

Crepe Myrtle

Carnation – These are still happily flowering away. Since the seeds were mixed colours, we have had white, light pink, dark pink, red and recently a dark purple Carnation. Strangely enough, they smell like cloves. I googled and turns out that the variety I have is called “clove pinks”, because of the smell.

Cascading colourful Carnations

Calendula – Until I grew this, I had no idea what a joy it is to see an orange flower. Maybe because that is my favourite colour! I had grown a couple of them in a pot, which took more than a year to flower and died after 2 pale yellow flowers. Since we did not have any vegetables in the patch this year, I sowed several seeds of Calendula. They struggled with some pests for a bit, but really shot to glory from January! Each flower lasts for roughly a week and attracts butterflies and bees.

Calendula

Winter is around the corner. While this forces us indoor, we have the lovely Daphne to look forward to.