Frost attack!

Melbourne is susceptible to frost during the winters. In the last 7 years, our garden has survived it well. Perhaps we did not have enough frost to cause much damage. This year, however, quite a few plants suffered damage.

Princess Lily bitten by the frost

The most disappointing one was guava. We had more fruits this year compared to last. Sadly, many of them were, literally, frozen in their tracks towards development! It’s not a pretty sight, but they deserve a mention on the blog. Other guavas will be ready in a month’s time for plucking.

Poor Guava

Blackened

Another victim of the frost is Tibouchina. The original Tibouchina is located under trees, so is not affected. The new ones are out in the open and quite tall. The frost took out most of the branches and the leaves started dropping at an alarming rate. I read on forums that the plant is not dead, but may need pruning of the dead branches once the risk of frost has passed.

Dead arm of Tibouchina

I am looking forward to spring soon and putting this winter behind us!

Birthday Lily

In Dec 2015, I got a Princess Lily plant for my birthday. It did well the first year under the Hakea. Then it started to die out due to lack of water. I had left it in the pot as we had no more place to plant anything new!

This summer, we did not plant any vegetables in the veggie patch. Instead, I planted all the flower seeds I had - Calendula, Carnation and Virginian Stock. In that process, I also moved the Princess Lily to the patch. Most of the leaves were already dead. But when I took it out of the pot, there was a massive network of roots! I had hopes that it would survive.

Sure enough, the roots settled in within a couple of weeks. Soon, the plant became bushier and started flowering. Here are some pictures of how well it is doing.

Princess Lily

Princess Lily

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.