Around the Garden

Our warm autumn seems to have confused the lilac:

It flowered in October, and seems to think that spring has arrived again.

The zygocatctuses all have buds. They normally begin to flower at the end of May, but this one is starting to open already:

A month ago we were supposed to deliver the TreeProject seedlings to our co-ordinator, but because there has been no rain at all where they are going we were asked to hang on to them for a bit longer. I mentioned then that the common fringe myrtles, Caltrix tetragona, had only just started to germinate. At the time I had little plants appearing in about 4 of the tubes, but lots more have germinated since then.

About 28 of the 48 tubes now have tiny plants growing in them.

And the final species, desert hakea, Hakea mitchelli, has also started germinating in the last couple of weeks:

They will obviously not be big enough to plant out this autumn, but perhaps by spring they will be ready to go into the ground. You need to have a bit of patience to grow these two species. The seeds were sown in early December. Five months of watering tubes of gravel before you get the reward of little plants!

It occurred to me today that I have not shown any pictures of  the newest parts of the garden. There are two new beds to the east of the house which have been planted over the last year. So here's a couple of photos for future comparison once they have grown.

The first bed is planted with natives, most of which came from the nursery at Melton Botanic Gardens. I think we took that trip in about June or July last year, although it seems I took no photos that day and never blogged about it. I don't know why, because it was a lovely day, and we bought lots of plants we had admired growing in the gardens.

Most of them have survived and thrived with minimal water over summer, which is fantastic.

The second bed also has a few natives, but we think of it more as our "Gondwana" bed as it also has lots of plants from southern Africa:

Aloes, leucadendrons, strelitzia, haemanthus, and kniphofias all from Africa, plus a kangaroo paw and some grevillea ground covers that will fill in the gaps. And my big rusty ball!