More colour from my patch of garden

I must be doing something right this year! My garden is really rewarding me with colour. I suspect it is my industrious husband's doing - he is out every single day with the hose, watering my seedlings and providing me with trailer loads of new soil. Tomorrow we are off to see if we can purchase some sugar cane mulch direct from the farm! My garden is really "spoilt"! I think it gets more attention than we do!

Number one picture is another look at my pretty multicoloured Tibouchina mutabilis. With these blooms all close together you can see how they change from white to a stronger pink colour. I prune this bush back once it has finished flowering and that keeps it from getting too big but better than that it develops more flower branches for the next year. Last year this bush was quite open but this year is more dense. Next year it should be even better.

The Agapanthus are out! They really are a majestic plant with their strappy green leaves and tall stems with big heads of blue on the top - they are such a contrast to most things in my garden which seem to be various shades of pink! I suppose I will have to dig some of them out after their flowering is over - they have multiplied so that they take up quite a bit of room. I wont be throwing them away though, when I lift them I shall plant them down the side of the driveway that goes down to the shed in the back. They wont mind being in the shade of trees and come November we shall be rewarded with a fantastic display of blue!

I have only one white Agapanthus and it is a little slower to open than the blue, It also looks a bit lonely but it will have "pups" so that I will have two or three plants next year.

The best bit of all is kept til last - the daylilies start showing off in November! I have about eight different daylilies and, like the agapanthus, they have pups that give me new plants every year so I have clumps of daylilies all through the garden ranging from single buttercup yellow to deep red that is almost brown. I love daylilies and have visited daylily farms - this is where some of my plants were purchased. I have a gorgeous one that a friend brought for me from a holiday and another that I bought from a gardener who had a stall on the side of the road! I will share some more of their beauty with you another time.
Dont forget that to see the pictures larger, click on them!
AJ

Yellow flower

Thanks to Jenny in Western Australia I now have a name for my bright and cheerful yellow flowers!

So for those of you who are curious, this yellow daisy is Coreopsis, It multiplies quite well and can be pulled apart easily and spread around. I started with only a punnet of seedlings so all these plants in one garden plus the plants in the next picture, in an adjacent garden are from those original six. I have not found it to be weed-like. It does not spread wildly appearing all through the garden unexpectedly - plus it is fairly shallow rooted and really easy to pull out should the plants become too numerous.

A friend gave me the pretty flowering shrub (lots of the plants in my garden have a story!). I was told it would be a white Tobouchina but, as you can see it is not completely white. The new flowers are white with pink on the back of the petals and as the days pass that colour appears on the white front of the petals. Because the colours mutate the plant has been called "Tibouchina mutabilis" Which, for me, makes remembering the name so much easier! This same friend gave me four different cuttings from his white Tibouchina but not one of them turned out to be white. The other three are deep purple. The purple variety is known as "Tibouchina austenville" and is the most common of the varieties seen around this area. it will be a few months before the third variety in my garden comes into bloom again. It is a pretty pink colour that does not mutate. The flowers are rather tatty when seen closely but the show created by the masses of flowers makes up for that.
(Click on a picture and you will see it larger, then click on the "back" button to return to the blog)
AJ

Little critters

I must apologise for being so slack about writing in my blog. Just when I think I have my life organised so that it is all mine, I volunteer to help people "do things" and so find I have no time at all! Today I have a little time just for me so here I am again!!!
While chasing around in the garden with the camera in search of "small" things for the photographic topic for Visions I came across all sorts of little bugs and spiders. Some lived to see another day but some have hopped off to another planet.

My first photo is not of a Calendular - a rather large showy flower that is usually a brilliant orange colour, no, this is a much small flower that comes up every year in my garden - I bought the first punnet of seedlings about ten years ago and since then I have split them and moved them around the garden and they flower prolifically for about three weeks. Each flower is about the size of a ten cent piece. No way can I remember the name of it though. Sorry about that!
Now I come to the bugs. There were lots of tiny spiders - I was using a macro lens so those tiny spiders now look quite impressive and a bit scary.

Now this one looks quite fearsome! But when you remember the size of a begonia (tree begonia) flower you then may realise that it is very small indeed.
This is the web of another of my garden inhabitants.

I am not sure if Mrs Spider is inside the funnel or if she expects her prey to get trapped in it. The web covered quite a large area between leaves and must have been newly made because there was nothing trapped and it was undamaged in any way.

The last little monster was really small - the web was stretched between three leaves and the spider was weighting down the middle of it. I thought the spider was transparent until I focused the macro lens on it and saw that rather than transparent it was a subtle green colour. The fancy markings on the spider's body surprised me. With the naked eye I couldn't see it. (Mind you I do need glasses if I have to read anything!!!)
 There are plenty more bugs and critters crawling and hopping around in my garden. There are even some miniature grasshoppers that make lots of little round holes in the Chrysanthemum leaves and the ones I found I photographed and sprayed. I obviously did not manage to find all of them because I have found more "aerated" leaves since.
A little reminder before I close. Click on the photos if you would like to see them larger. Click on the "back" arrow (top left) to return to the blog.
AJ