Sunday, December 28, 2008

Christmas Leftovers



OK, so here is a Christmas post for gardeners.

Only a very few flowers are left on my NSW Christmas Bush, so I had no Christmas Bush for His Adorning this year. The shrub is still fairly small and they tend to flower a bit erratically until they are older.

In Australia, you'll find a raft of Christmas plants. Maybe I'll try growing Christmas Bells some time.








But we don't stop there; in Sydney, we have Christmas Beetles! This one turned up the week before Christmas. It is about 3cm long, though they do grow bigger. Here it is on the Geek's hand.




We also spotted (geddit?) this 1.5-cm beetle on the Babingtonia virgata, which was a Baeckea virgata when I bought it -- or was it a Baeckia virgata? Even the Australian National Botanical Gardens can't keep it straight; no wonder they renamed the species! I had better mention that this is one of my favourite plants and that the beetle was collecting nectar from the little honey-scented flowers.



Of course our Christmas lunch isn't quite so light, and we tend to feel like this...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Its nice to have a garden that automatically "decks the halls".
Our garden usually goes to great lengths to put on a fabulous Christmas display but all the buds fell off my "Summer Pink" this year (sob) so the two remaining grevilleas had to put on the show.

(Hope you and yours had a great Christmas)

Anonymous said...

My garden barely survived my 4 week trip. Turns out Hubby has the brown thumb, not me. Herbs are all gone and something has attacked my avocado tree. Thankfully my frangapani and lemon tree seem to have escaped the majority of the carnage.

DrRuth said...

Thanks for the christmas beetles. I haven't thought about them in almost 20 years!

Anonymous said...

My house was full of Christmas beetles this year.

As evidenced in my Christmas post. What I didn't show was the one smooshed into Boo's leg while he opened his presents!