Colour in my December summer garden

I love my December summer front garden. Every year it blooms glorious colours - 

red, yellow, pink, bluey mauve - and best of all these plants come back year after 

year with little maintenance. They bloom, I water and clip them back a little, 

and next summer they bloom again. Beautiful. 

So today I share some of them with you.  (My apologies for this post apearing strange 

on mobile phones. - I don't know how to fix it. Sorry)

Mauve-blue agapanthus, against the backdrop of the red coral bush, and along 

the bottom my wild hibiscus - an Australian native 

Pinks and mauves of the hydrangea - I must admit that the ones along the top 

row - the bluey mauve ones - are in my neighbour's garden

 

Roses, though they have finished their first glorious flush

The yellow Coreopsis daisy that is a wonderful border plant that comes 

back every year, frangipani, and the yellow rose bush

 

Last year a glorious new frangipani flowered in my garden - a cutting gifted to me 

by my friend - It looks like it has buds on it again - so fingers crossed. 

Native yellow and green kangaroo paws - the honey-eaters love these. 

The Australian native red bottle-brush

My Hoya is flowering in my shady patio garden

In my back garden we are picking apricots (a month early this year - looks like I 

will be making apricot jam later this week), the red and green grapes are looking 

fabulous along the side fence, and the tomatoes are coming on. We also quinces 

on our tree which will be ready in autumn. 

The apricot tree has bags all over it to firstly guard against fruit fly, and 

secondly to keep the birds off when the apricots are ready to pick. The parrots

love apricots too! 

Some of the native trees are blooming too. Everything seems early this year - 

you can see some of them on my previous post here - 

Trees are blooming for Christmas. Below are the candlestick banksia (they remind

me of giant Christmas candles), purple jacaranda (not an Australian native), 

the yellow Christmas tree, and the red flowering gum. So vibrant. 

Thank you so much for stopping by. I value your comments and look forward to 

hearing from you. I will try to visit your blogs in return. Have a wonderful week. 

I am linking up to the link-ups below. Please click on the links to see fabulous 

contributions from around the world - virtual touring at its best!

   

Mosaic Monday @ Soul & Mind & So On

Saturdays Critters - Viewing Nature With Eileen

Travel Tuesday

Pictorial Tuesday 

ThroughMy Lens 
Image-in-ing
My corner of the world through my camera 
Wednesday Around the World at Communal Global hosted by Randomosity. 
       and Little bird - Pienilintu
Thankful Thursday 
Welcome to Nature Thursday

Skywatch Friday

Hello there! I love reading your comments. If you scroll down to the bottom you can comment too! I would love to hear from you.

October garden

Hi everyone, just a few photos from around my garden this week. It is spring here in Australia and it feels like, to me at least, that it has been a weird start to spring, cold and wet days, and then a burst of warm weather. But perhaps the change in seasons is always like this. We are into the last two weeks of October and tonight we have the fire on - it should be warming up by now. Though I know I shouldn't complain as I know the heat is coming. But I must say I think our garden is enjoying the rain, cooler days and sunshine.

In our back garden our apricot tree is rocketing away with new fruit - we've had to put the net up to keep the parrots off, we have blueberries ripening - so fantastic to eat straight off the bush, the lemon tree is flowering even though there is still some of last season's fruit on the tree, the tomatoes are putting out baby tomatoes, and the grape vine is forming grapes. 

 I made French Marmalade and Lemon Butter with some of those lemons. The marmalade has carrots in it and is delicious - not a sour marmalade like some of them can be.

My new quince tree has flowers! I adore quinces, so I am looking forward with anticipation to my first piece of fruit. I can even see the start of tiny quinces!

In my front garden there are flowers - the green kangaroo paws are reaching up their green heads on long stalks, the Bird of Paradise is putting out a couple of final flowers, the lavender is flowering, the pelargoniums are looking fantastic, new buds are bursting on my roses, and this yellow native is making a bright ground cover.

 The kangaroo paws are native to Western Australia.  The type I have is a tall green kangaroo paw - Anigozanthos flavidus 'Green' - which grows up to 2 metres tall. It flowers throughout the summer. 

Kangaroo paws belong to the genus Anigozanthos, which has 11 species. The closely related Black Kangaroo Paw is called Macropidia fulginosa. 
 Anigozanthos and Macropidia occur naturally only in the southwest of Western Australia. They occur in a variety of habitats and soil types    Australian National Herbarium

 
 My Port Wine Magnolia is looking beautiful, but the little birds haven't built there this year.

On Friday I was invited to photograph a beautiful garden in the Ferguson Valley for the coming Ferguson Valley Open Gardens weekend - 10-11th November. More on that in the next couple of weeks. 

And I met a baby lamb only 10 days old, one of a set of triplets kicked out by the other two, and still learning to suck. It was good to hear yesterday that she is now doing well.

Just a short post from me today - life has been hectic this last week and I need to catch up. But thank you so much for stopping by. I value your comments and look forward to hearing from you. I will try to visit your blogs in return. Have a wonderful week.  

Next week I will be back to share another photography project I've been working on. See you then! 
 
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I am linking up to the link-ups below. Please click on the links to see fabulous contributions from around the world - virtual touring at its best!

   
All Seasons
Mosaic Monday 

Our World Tuesday

Pictorial Tuesday 

ThroughMy Lens 

Image-in-ing
Wednesday Around the World at Communal Global
Travel Photo Thursday 

The Lovin' Life Team over at: Deep Fried Fruit and 50 Shades of Age
Little Things Thursday

Life in Reflection

Hello there! I love reading your comments. If you scroll down to the bottom you can comment too! I would love to hear from you.

An InLinkz Link-up

Being grateful for life in the retirement fast lane

 Whoever said life in retirement was boring certainly wasn't getting out and making the most of all there is to offer. Seriously? I was amazed when a retiree I knew advised me not to stop work because she was so bored in retirement she went back to work!  Like many other recent retirees I know, life for me has never been so busy, I haven't regretted retiring for a minute, and I don't know how I had time to work. Do any of my retiree readers feel like that? What do your retirement years look like?

When I was given redundancy back in April 2015, I took it as a positive and called it early retirement. An exciting new future had opened its doors for me where I could explore interests in my life which working had kept on the back burner. 

So because life is running so full at the moment, I only have time this week to bring you just a small snapshot of the last couple of months ....

Last week I was exploring Sydney - more pics and stories to come!

  Please click here to read more...

The fruits of summer

I love the fruit this time of year, especially the beautiful stone fruits that we can buy locally grown in our area - peaches, nectarines, plums. The plums with the dark red flesh are my favourite. I used to always buy satsuma plums, but now they are hard to find, so I buy a "rosa" plum variety. Evidently the red flesh varieties are very high in anti-oxidants. 

According to the Department of Agriculture and Food "The south-west region has a temperate Mediterranean climate, suitable soils and availability of good quality, irrigation water which favours the production of high quality, flavoured and well coloured stone fruit". So how lucky are we!
Mixed in with that we also have strawberries, blueberries, grapes, cherries, rhubarb, bananas, apples.... No wonder I love the fruits of summer!

hmm...where are the strawberries! We haven't grown strawberries for years. At one time we used to go out to a strawberry garden just out of Bunbury where you could "pick your own" (tastings allowed). We used to pick a few kilo, eat them fresh and make strawberry jam - so delicious straight from the vine.

We only have a small back garden, but we have an apricot, lemon, and orange trees and two grape vines. And during summer a few tomato plants. Below you can see our trees. On the RHS of the top picture you can see the net "structure" made from irrigation pipe that we put up over our apricot tree so that the birds don't take all our fruit. The apricots are usually finished by mid-January, so then we take the net off and put it over our grape vine (LHS). It is the only way we can keep the birds away, but still they manage to find little holes to come through.

So from apricot flowers to fruit - 

How about a beautiful apricot dessert -

This one has Tiramisu  mixture on the top - 

or a delicious apricot and almond dessert slice with cream. I made this with home bottled apricots, you can see them in the background.

Recipe compliments of Tartlette - go here for the link - Apricot & almond tart

Or how about a simple fresh summer fruit bowl with yoghurt or for breakfast with musli? I don't know why I don't have a breakfast like this every day this time of year!

And of course you can't forget the jam making

So there you have it. The fruits of summer. Do you have fruit trees growing in your back yard?

Next week I will come back and tell you about the grape jam making - it is a tradition in our family.

Until then...... I'm having breakfast on my patio with the travel section of the newspaper while I dream about our next holiday.  Have a wonderful week. I look forward to hearing from you. 

I am linking up with Mary and the other wonderful contributors at Mosaic Monday at Little Red House and Our World Tuesday. Please click here on the links to see their contributions...... 

Mosaic Monday

Our World Tuesday

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Lemon Tart

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