November display

This morning when I looked out of my kitchen window my breath was taken away with the beauty on show by one little garden tree. Yesterday there were one or two flowers on it but this morning it was smothered with them,

The remarkable thing about this particular Tibouchina is that the petals are different shades of pink. This was originally a cutting given to me by a friend. It was taken off a white tibouchina (as was the other cutting which has turned out to be purple). This TIbouchina is Tibouchina Mutabilis - a known hybrid of the genus so why it should have grown from a cutting from a completely different tree I have no idea!!
Here is a closer look (It is worth taking a closer look!)

If you were to click on the picture you will be rewarded with a larger image. So much easier to see.
The individual florets have distinctive angular stamens. The wild birds do not show any interest in the flowers nor have I noticed many insects of them either. Maybe the pollination is done by the wind.

I have two other Tibouchina varieties in my garden and neither is showing signs of being as covered with flowers as this one - of the other two, one is the dark purple variety and the other a rich pink.
I thought that Spring was an exciting time for colour in my garden but this month which is the end of spring, is proving to be just as exciting.
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

Link to more photos of Spring in Toowoomba

As promised, I have put my photos of the Gardens I visited into an album.
Here they are.

The Spring Gardens of Toowoomba 2011

Enjoy!
AJ

Spring on the Mountain

Spring is in the air! So many places are inviting garden lovers to visit them with special spring festivals or Open Gardens. Last week it was Toowoomba that was the subject for my camera (video) and this weekend it was a place much closer to home, Mount Tamborine. This time around I used the Nikon D70s and had a great time in the perfect sunlight capturing both wide angle shots of scenes as well as close up shots with wonderful bokeh (wonderful broken shapes in the background caused by the shallow depth of field) such as in my first photograph of cherry blossom.
The first garden I visited was actually the Botanic Gardens and the weekend was a fund-raiser for this new and developing garden. What has been done already is wonderful and it is a pleasure to wander around with a camera.
One part of the garden is devoted to palms and the light and shade created by the palms gives a wonderful atmosphere of being in a jungle. A raised boardwalk keeps the tramp of many feet off the soil so that water courses are not formed when there is a rainfall and also so that the roots of the trees are not damaged. There are companion organisms in the soil around the trees that could be destroyed with the weight of walking feet and raised walkways are very much a feature of some sensitive parts of National Parks too.
Yet another part of the Botanic Garden is devoted to the Japanese style of garden along with raked gravel and arched bridge with red uprights. Comparing this with the Japanese Garden in Toowoomba and the Japanese Garden in Cowra would not be very fair, this one gives the impression of being very new and not really very Japanese. But I would guess that things will change over the years and it will grow to be an impressive area.
More on the other gardens in another posting.
AJ