I'm weighing in to Carol's Garden Bloggers Bloom Day a little early this month as my wife and I are heading off on a romantic weekend jaunt later this morning. It's a wonderful time to be in the garden with so many plants bursting with vivacious ease and colour. It's hard to leave it alone for another weekend but I'm sure the following one will be filled with plenty of gardening activity.

This is my eldest daughter's daisy plant which she propagated when I attended one of her classes to discuss propagation. I'm not sure how the rest of the class got on but E. has done an amazing job nurturing hers. We've even given her a spot in one of the front garden beds to start raising it. This is one of our newest garden members, the Fringe Lily (Thysanotus multiflorus). Unfortunately it hasn't unfurled all its beauty yet but when it does it will be absolutely stunning. The flowers open up as three-peaked stars with the edge of each peak hemmed with it's own fringe - thereby getting its common name. At the moment, the local spiders are just happy to use it as a fly trap but I'm sure they will move on once it opens more. How's this delightful feijoa flower? For those who have been reading GTNI for awhile you may remember my heartbreak with last year's guava trees and how a friend had expressed that you need two of these to cross-pollinate. Needless to say, I never did get around to buying or propagating another plant and I've had a few comments since that indicate that this may not be true. So, the proof is in the pudding, as they say and we shall see whether any of these flowers produce fruit later in the season. This is one of our ramshackle cottage garden aspects that i had to show just to give you some idea of the beautiful bougainvillea that is sweeping across our fence at the moment. Alas, the yellow daylillies have finished for the time being so it looks just like a jungle of red and white at the moment. The red flower in front of the bougainvillea is Cardinal Salvia (Lobelia cardinalis). This is our native daphne (Eriostemon myoporoides "Profusion") - which are now lumped in with the Philotheca family. It gets some morning sun but is kept in the shade for the rest of the day and yet it still grows well. While "profusion" is something it can't achieve under these conditions, it still maintains its compact shrubiness and flowers well.

I have a ton of other flowers to show as well including penstemons, our honeysuckle, a few other unidentified natives plus others but time has gotten away from me. Another time perhaps...