Six on Saturday – 16/12/2017

We’re running at around 32°C by day and 20°C by night. Can’t believe we’ve been here a week. Our host’s garden is a modest affair, as are most gardens in the very many new housing developments hereabouts. All the houses are single storey, so have a big footprint, not leaving a lot of room for the garden.

One.
This is pretty much the whole of the back garden. It’s wildly exotic, palms, Strelitzia, Frangipani, bromeliads and so on. I hate to say it, but it quickly becomes a new normal. I haven’t managed to get a picture of a rainbow lorikeet yet, though they are visitors most mornings. It’s harder to see them as normal. Our hosts used to feed them, but 30 lorikeets at 5 in the morning are not an alarm you sleep through, so they stopped.

Two.
There are four Frangipanis in the garden here. This one seems to be Plumeria alba, but is probably a selected form. It has a very nice scent that doesn’t immediately remind me of anything else.

Three.
A bit of shade. Down the side of the house is an area that is shady until mid morning and from mid afternoon on. Herbs and annuals find conditions a bit more tolerable here, though frequent watering is vital. At 7 in the morning, I find conditions ideal for eating breakfast outside. It’s fresh, the light is bright but not harsh, the temperature about 20°C.

Four.
It’s a war against beasties of all sorts. Adenium obtusum, the Dessert Rose, is something I’ll put in next time, but this caterpillar was making a meal of one of its flowers. I have no idea what this is the larva of, probably some stunning enormous tropical butterfly.

Five.
Not all palms are big. This one is about six feet tall, perfect for a scaled down exotic look. The downside is that it is a mass of three inch needle sharp spines. The dead flower heads tend to stay where they are until he drop naturally.

Six.
Bromeliads, which I’ve always thought of as epiphytes, grow very well in the ground here, provided that they have some shade. There are several sorts here, some with a single large rosette, some spreading with many small rosettes. The down side is that the water that collects in the rosettes provides a habitat for mosquitoes, and they are plenty bad enough without any help. Dining outside in the evening is very pleasant but you need some industrial strength insect repellent.

I don’t think there’s any way I can squeeze  Aussie wildlife into six garden connected items, but we saw this baby possum and its mum up a tree on Bribie Island when we were out there this morning. They were being screamed at by lorikeets, which was what got our attention.

It’s nearly Sunday here now, I need to get this posted. The perspective of an imposter in the southern hemisphere. I’m not missing winter so much, but I am looking forward to following all the links from The Propagator’s six on Saturday posting.