Picture This: Winter's Beauty

Here is my entry for the Gardening Gone Wild Photo Competition for January.

It is a bit difficult for a Sydneysider to photograph snow, frost and so forth; our winters include the occasional light frost and once we had to scrape ice off the windscreen of our car -- that's once in the last eight years! While Australia does have a couple of places to ski, I haven't visited any of them since I married, as my husband is convinced that skiing wouldn't be fun. But then The Geek's idea of fun includes kernel hacking and going to Anglican meetings.

This picture is of a flower on my Correa 'Dusky Bells'. It's a pretty little plant, which is thought to be a hybrid of two of the eleven Australian Correa species. The plant is supposed to grow slowly to about 1m high and wide. After five year, mine is only about 30cm each way. The tubular flowers are about an inch long and would attract honeyeaters if they were higher off the ground. Those tan smudges in the background are buds.

I hope the deep pink and green of this winter-flowering plant helps give a lift to those who have seen too much of the white stuff lately!