Our puppy, Lloyd, really likes sticks. Unfortunately he doesn’t see a problem creating his own sticks by “pruning” our plants. In fact, green sticks are the best sticks to chew on! This means that our plants are slowly becoming standard plants whether we like it or not. Lucky for him, they don’t seem to mind. Check out this oddly shaped sea of red!
Captain Cook has gone mad with buds this year! I hope it’ll be strong enough to hold up all these heavy flowers when the time comes!
Other pretty flowers in our garden right now:
Love our swan river pea. Never lets us down.
Our neighbours gave us a clipping of their succulent. It’s doing pretty well now!
And of course Molly is still blessing us with a constant sea of flowers.
Since Molly has limited time with us due to the eventual shed building which will occur in her place, I have decided to bring my enjoyment of her inside, along with her callistamon friend and grandma’s New Zealand sheep.
My natives have been looking scraggley and unshapely and top heavy. I’ve never really pruned anything before so I did some research and found that natives in general don’t mind a prune every now and then. They’re used to being pruned naturally by animals or their windy environment. I specifically looked up swan river pea because this is particularly unshapely and I wanted to make sure it didn’t mind a bit of a harder prune before I came at it with the secateurs. From what I read, it loves a good prune and will be a scraggley looking plant without it. So I went a bit further than just tip pruning to give it a bit of shape but still went on the cautious side for it’s first prune. A good trim had the added bonus of getting rid of the caterpillars that made the end leaf tips into a cocoon.
For my callistemon, I just gave it a tip prune to encourage it to bush up a bit. It’s getting a bit top heavy and requires staking, even when it’s not heavy with flowers.
Despite heavy staking, my King’s Park Special callistemon is droopy with redness. And all this from the plant that took two years to flower! It’s definitely making up for lost time! It’s almost always got a wattle bird hanging off it too. Love bringing to birds to our inner city abode!
My Callistemon (King’s Park Special) started flowering for the first time in June. This was very exciting because it hadn’t flowered since I planted it nearly 2 years earlier. Well, it’s certainly making up for lost time! It just keeps getting more and more buds on it. And the birds love it! It’s so nice to be able to attract so many birds (other than pigeons) even though we live so close to the city. And they’ve always got a water source from our shed’s sagging gutters! We’ll have to get a bird bath when we finally build a new shed!
I planted this Callistamon called King’s Park Special nearly 2 years ago and it’s finally flowering for the first time! I was getting worried that I’d never see it’s lovely red blooms! It’s probably tripled in size since I planted it but never produced any flower buds until now. And it’s making up for lost time – it’s covered in them! Hopefully it’ll be as dense with flowers as my Captain Cook Callistamon gets!
Who would have thought such a small plant could produce so much redness! Happy Mr Captain Cook.
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