Winter in the land of sun

It is really cold these mornings. in fact it is so cool that it is difficult to wriggle out from under my cosy feather doona ("doovey", "quilt") to face the day. Colin races down to the other end of the house to switch on the reverse cycle airconditioning to warm the place up. Perhaps he is afraid that he might miss out on breakfast if he didn't! How cold is it? Well this morning was a freezing 13 decrees!

Yes, I am tongue in cheek. 13 degrees is not really cold for most people in the world but for us poor people acclimatised to the not so cold temperature of the sub tropics, it is!

The good thing about winter is the change of plants in the garden. I haven't done a thing and the garden is ablaze with colour - mostly because it is being contrasted with the snowflake or snowball bushes. These shrubs are a type of poinsettia, sometimes called the Christmas bush in the UK because the red blooms are used as floral decoration at Christmas. They really come into their own in the cooler weather.

Here is a close up of the flowers of the snowball bush. You can see the likeness with the much larger flowers of the red poinsettia. The flowers are coloured leaves - more correctly "bracts" and the flowers are tiny and mistaken as stamens.

The flowers of the snowball bush

Just to show how these plants really make a fantastic show, here is a shot of my front garden. Actually it is really difficult to find the right time of day to take a shot from the road like this - the front garden faces South so at any time of the day the sun is behind the house. The plants nearest to the house never have the warmth of sun on their soil and roots. This is why I have had to plant shade loving plants there - such as ginger, tropical rhododendron and azalea. There are many plants which can enjoy living in shady places like this but they are mostly foliage and rarely flower.

The snowball bushes are to the left of the tall Alexander Palm

The red plant to the right of the palm is a double poinsettia

So here is one shot of my front garden. If I were to walk a few paces I could show much more - enough to bore the socks of you! So one is enough. I just hope that this year there will not be a heavy frost as there was a couple of years ago. The plants were all burnt off - even the palm trees - with one night frost of minus ten. It has taken two years for the palm trees to shed their dead leaves.

AJ