I can rarely walk out of a bookstore or a plant nursery empty handed!
We wanted to renew the mulch in our garden before the weeds started to spread during spring and summer. It was a simple task, should have taken us 10 mins. But when we got there, I had a wishlist ready which consisted of buying a red flower. It was recently I realised that all the flowers in our garden are white, yellow, pink or purple. The Kalanchoe is red but flowers for a very short time.
Little did we know that finding a striking red flower can be so difficult! We wanted a perennial, bold and large red flower. Bottle brush and Azaleas were out due to personal reference. Everything else was an annual. We did like the summer bulbs of Gladioli and Lily, but those are short lived. Hence, we were walking out dejectedly after picking up the bulbs.
At the checkout of Masters, they had a collection of natives. Through the closely placed plants, Anshuman spotted a Waratah. It is an Australian native and the state emblem of NSW. It has a large showy flower, bright red in colour. Hence, we ended up buying it, along with Lily and Gladioli.
You would think that at least one of those would deliver. But noooooo. Here is the sad tale of the red flower.
Lily: This is what it looked like in November. It took a month or so to get to this point. We were soon going on a holiday for 3 weeks, so hoped that it would flower AFTER that. But one cannot control nature - it flowered behind our backs and didnt even have a fallen petal to show for it!
Gladioli: Did not flower, only sprouted some nice leaves and that's it.
Waratah: Flowered and looked good doing it. Sadly, we did not take a single photo! And now the plant is dead. Yes, the plant that can survive a bush fire did not survive our garden. How depressing is that! Anyway, here is an image from the web to show what potential it had.
So, in the end we were left with our trusty Carnation to save the day. They flowered in all shades of red.
We wanted to renew the mulch in our garden before the weeds started to spread during spring and summer. It was a simple task, should have taken us 10 mins. But when we got there, I had a wishlist ready which consisted of buying a red flower. It was recently I realised that all the flowers in our garden are white, yellow, pink or purple. The Kalanchoe is red but flowers for a very short time.
Little did we know that finding a striking red flower can be so difficult! We wanted a perennial, bold and large red flower. Bottle brush and Azaleas were out due to personal reference. Everything else was an annual. We did like the summer bulbs of Gladioli and Lily, but those are short lived. Hence, we were walking out dejectedly after picking up the bulbs.
At the checkout of Masters, they had a collection of natives. Through the closely placed plants, Anshuman spotted a Waratah. It is an Australian native and the state emblem of NSW. It has a large showy flower, bright red in colour. Hence, we ended up buying it, along with Lily and Gladioli.
You would think that at least one of those would deliver. But noooooo. Here is the sad tale of the red flower.
Lily: This is what it looked like in November. It took a month or so to get to this point. We were soon going on a holiday for 3 weeks, so hoped that it would flower AFTER that. But one cannot control nature - it flowered behind our backs and didnt even have a fallen petal to show for it!
 |
| Lily |
Gladioli: Did not flower, only sprouted some nice leaves and that's it.
 |
| Gladioli |
Waratah: Flowered and looked good doing it. Sadly, we did not take a single photo! And now the plant is dead. Yes, the plant that can survive a bush fire did not survive our garden. How depressing is that! Anyway, here is an image from the web to show what potential it had.
 |
| By Casliber (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons |
So, in the end we were left with our trusty Carnation to save the day. They flowered in all shades of red.
 |
| Carnation |
