Crinum Bulbs Around Coburg

Seeing this flower bud this morning reminded me that the rest of this post has been sitting round as a draft for months.

This is a flower forming on one the crinum bulbs rescued back in April. This one should be more successful than the previous flower which came up in the middle of winter before the whole clump was knocked back by the frost.

Here's the previous flower open:

All those leaves were destroyed by the frost. The new ones haven't yet regrown to that extent.

The rest of this post is pictures of the same bulbs growing in lots of different properties around this suburb. The strange thing is that I have not seen them in any of the adjacent suburbs. Most of the houses where they are growing were built over 80 years ago, and have gardens that have not been "renovated" in quite some time. It seems the bulbs were passed around the neighbourhood at some time in the past, but as I've never seen one in any of the houses built by post-war migrants, (whose gardens tend to be full of easily-propagated plants), I think that sharing must have happened before the second world war. So these clumps of bulbs have probably all outlived the people who planted them!

These ones in a house built in the 1880s or 1890s:

1920s house:

1920s house:

Most recent I've seen so far, built in either 1930s or 1940s:

1920s:

This house has been covered in bricks at some point, so most identifying features are missing, but it could be 1910s:

In another street which is mainly more recent houses, the only ones I found are on the nature strip outside a 1920s house:

Scruff checking them out.

Peeping over the side fence of another 1920s house:

These pictures were all taken back in winter. I will have to walk past them all again now to see if they also are starting to flower as the weather warms up.