Early summer in Victoria is the time for spectacular flowering on three trees in particular that I always enjoy seeing.
This Jacaranda mimosifolia, from subtropical South America, is growing in the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne in front of the original Director's residence within the gardens. Always a beautiful sight.
Among the native Australian flowering trees, the Brachychiton acerifolius would have to be one of the most spectacular. The intense red of the flowers is exaggerated because the flower stems are also the same colour and the same slightly fleshy quality.
As you can see in this photo, if it loses all its leaves at flowering, the sight is extraordinary. I have been nursing along one of these beauties in our garden. However, away from its natural home on the mid-eastern coast of Australia, it struggles from our poor soil quality and low summer rainfall. This one is growing in the well-watered parkland that surrounds the Melbourne Botanic Gardens.
The third flowering tree in this group is the Grevillea robusta, this one also in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens.
In this case my attention was drawn to the tall tree because of the yellow-gold stamens littering the footpath.
For a close up I photographed this lower growing branch near the lakeside restaurant...
...and in our own garden the somewhat smaller tree has more flowers than ever this year.
To ikebana. The following are the last photos I have from 2019 classes .
In Geelong, Maree used Amaranthus caudatus for her principal line in this cascading ikebana.
Maureen teamed lichen encrusted Boxthorn with the orangey-red flower of the New South Wales Christmas Bush Ceratopetalum gummiferum. Her exercise was to make an ikebana arrangement 'that incorporated the area around the vessel'.
Ellie's exercise was to make an arrangement/installation 'for a particular place in the classroom'. She chose to work in front of a panel heater with vertical indentations. To emphasise the lines, Ellie arranged straight stemmed Strelitzia flowers. On the upper surface of the heater she arranged two New Zealand Flax leaves and a single Strelitzia flower peeping from behind the leaves.
In my class with Elizabeth, the exercise was to make ikebana in a vessel that was not intended to be used for ikebana.
Pearl used an assemblage of river stones to set some bark, Smoke bush and a pink Grevillea.
Swan used a ceramic teapot in which she arranged two roses and some Smoke bush leaves.
My ikebana was created in a unique hand-crafted wooden box that was given to Laurie and me as a wedding present. I set the close fitting lid of the box at an angle, dividing the box into two triangular compartments, into which I arranged five Dietes grandiflora leaves and three stems of Freesia laxa flowers. The ikebana had a playful, open feel with a sense of swirling movement.
Greetings from Christopher
4th January 2020
As I write this on Saturday afternoon in Torquay on the Surfcoast on the west side of Victoria, the cool change has brought down our temperature to 17 Celsius. In Mallacoota and the south coast of New South Wales the bushfires have worsened after the lull that allowed some evacuations by sea to take place yesterday afternoon.
Thank you for the photos of those beautiful trees in flower.
ReplyDeleteI have been listening to NPR and saddened by the devastating fires Australia is dealing with. The loose of lives, wildlife and destroyed landscape is beyond any appropriate expression I can think to write.