What Will my Husband Have to Say?

Maybe if I do a small picture, it won't look so bad.


I met some Flylady friends in Penrith today, and since I was in the area, I thought I'd pop in at a native nursery nearby. The first one I thought of was Sydney Wildflower Nursery West, but the owner has closed it to concentrate on his landscape work.

Cranebrook Native Nursery, however, was not too far away, so I went there instead. Unfortunately for me, they are about to close their retail business in order to concentrate on the wholesale side: they supply bush regeneration projects across Sydney, as well as the regular landscape trade. Unfortunately for my husband they were having a Closing Sale, with most things half-price or more.

I now own, er, another 31 plants! Here's the list:

Thyme Honey-Myrtle, Melaleuca thymifolia 'Cotton Candy'
Cardwell's Tea-Tree, Leptospermum flavescens 'Cardwell'
3x Dwarf Baeckea, Babingtonia virgata nana
Fine-Leaved Creeping Boobialla, Myoporum parvifolium (at the request of the Twig)
Native Violet, Viola hederacea 'Baby Blue'
Yellow Buttons, Helichrysum ramosissima
Spiny-headed Mat-rush, Lomandra longifolia
Blue Flax Lily, Dianella revoluta
6x Kangaroo Grass, Themeda triandra
4x Common Rush, Juncus usitatus
4x Swamp Foxtail Grass, Pennisetum alopecuroides
2x Canberra Grass, Scleranthus biflorus (at the request of the Sprig)
5x Swan River Daisy, Brachycome 'Break O' Day'

The Thyme Honey-Myrtle is a one-metre shrub with dainty dark-green leaves and pink (or mauve) flowers that look rather like fairy-floss, hence the cultivar name. Cardwell's Tea-Tree grows taller than that, probably 2m, and when in bloom is entirely covered with white. I think it's even prettier in bud, when its little salmon-pink balls are just starting to open. The Baeckea, as I noted the other day, is one of my favourite shrubs, because of its soft foliage as well as its tiny white flowers, and I'm only sorry that these are the low-growing kind. The rest are are ground-covers, herbs or grasses. All up, I paid $76. Now to work out where to place them!