Spring notes

The biggest news this spring is a lone lime in our 4-year old tree! Every year we get excited when we see the white flowers on the plant. Every year we watch in despair as they drop to the ground one-by-one. This repeats the next season. Until now, one lime, which we almost missed behind all the leaves!

Lime

In other news, Carnation was still happily flowering away. They are my favourite flowers! I planted the seeds in a pot, so they are a bit leggy trying to find the sun. But the flowers still looked pretty, even when not upright.

Carnation

Daisies are the really looked-forward to flowers. They turn up almost overnight and are such followers of the sun! We have them in three colours, so its hard to decide which colour is the best.

Orange daisies

Purple daisies

Pink daisies

Other flowers at this time are the Magnolia and the Eternal Fragrance Daphne. The Magnolia has such a strong perfume that even our next neighbour can smell it in her house! The flowering season does not last too long, only 2-3 weeks. The flowers itself are pretty delicate and the petals fall off with the wind.

Magnolia

The Eternal Fragrance Daphne lives up to its name. The first flowers bloom at this time of the year for about 3 weeks. Once they die down, the plant gives out new leaves and extends its scope. The next set of flowers will bloom in November, just in time for outdoor sitting season.

Eternal Fragrance Daphne

A little overshadowed by its neighbours, the Cherry Leaf Lilly Pilly gives out new leaves at this time. The leaves are a dark red in colour, giving the tree (or bush?) its name. The Lilly Pilly is quite small, only about 3 feet high compared to the other one that we have.

Cherry Leaf Lilly Pilly

The Hakea is quite tall now and successfully blocking our neighbour's from viewing our kitchen! In the spring, there are tiny feathery flowers all along the stem. In the tall tree, they look quite spectacular.

Hakea

And finally, a previously unknown succulent is standing quite tall! This was given to us by my parents when they visited us in April 2012. It came in two little tea cup sized terracotta pots. In the pots it got water sparingly. When we setup our succulent bed, we planted some cuttings. There it got water 2-4 times a week. Judging by the height, it obviously does well with water!

Update Jul 2016: This is Variegated Crassula sarmentosa

Variegated Crassula sarmentosa

P.S. The Jasmine is starting to make an appearance with some flowers. More later!

Jasmine

A green shopping list

So, there we were, standing in the garden section of Bunnings and wondering what to do because the plants on our list were unavailable! That was our first lesson.

Lesson 1: Have a plan B when the local nursery doesn't stock the plant you want.

Lilly Pilly

Anyway, there were enough knowledgeable people around who could help us pick out something else. We came home with a native tree called Lilly Pilly. It was to be our screening plant (or neighbours-be-gone as called in Australia!). It was already 3 feet tall and expected to grow by a foot every year.We ended up buying a native plant specific fertilizer and a Lilly Pilly disease resistant tablet and also learnt our second lesson in the process.

Lesson 2: The nursery will sell you all sorts of paraphernalia that you don't need.

The Lilly Pilly was so big that it took us novices the better part of the evening to plant it. It took us a couple of hours to get it out of the pot itself! We were trying to beat the sunset but could not finish the mammoth task before it became dark. After struggling to plant such a big (and extremely expensive) tree, we decided to never buy a mature plant.

Lesson 3: Better to grow a plant from seed or a cutting, than to waste money on a mature plant.

Having learnt some new lessons in life, our second purchase was much more practical. We bought young plants of African Daisy, Myoporum and a different kind of Lilly Pilly. These were intended to flank the Lilly Pilly tree. The Myoporum is an Australian native ground cover, we wanted to use it as a garden bed edging. The African daisy was going to give some cheer all year round with random flowering. We were very pleased with the final result.

Our loot!

African Daisy

Before mulch

There was one last thing to do which is a typical garden addition in Australia - mulch. Mulch is widely used in the garden beds and serves a dual purpose of preventing evaporation and preventing weeds from growing. It gave a very nice finish to the garden bed.

After mulch