By Beatrice Hawkins
Recently this country person has had to be in Sydney for a while. Not my favourite place to be but it is interesting to see what is happening with town parks and gardens.
Down one of the streets I’ve been using, they have big pots high up on the light poles, full of beautiful red begonias with the pots fringed with a purple leaved plant. In another area there is a spectacular display on a vertical green wall on the footpath, covered in a variety of herbs and flowers. Outside another building there is a hedge of Indian hawthorn covered in perfumed white flowers attracting numbers of bees, something you don’t see to many of among the tall buildings. In another spot I saw a “yesterday, today and tomorrow” in full flower.
Large concrete flower boxes are filled with annual salvias surrounded by petunias, both just coming into flower. They adorn the footpaths and will look spectacular in the coming weeks. The council responsible is to be commended in providing some beauty to such a crowded and busy space.
I am enjoying the many wonderful florist displays in shops as well. Buckets of daffodils spill out onto the footpaths with some beautiful double varieties I haven’t seen before, providing a spectacular sight. The quantity and variety flowers and plants on display is astonishing. I would have filled the motel room to overflowing if I had something to put them in…but flower vases are not standard in motel accommodation!
Driving down I saw a wonderful amount and variety of native flowers and stopped many times to take pictures! Good thing that I was travelling on my own!
The various wattles are still flowering spectacularly and I have never seen such displays of hardenbergia and native clematis still flowering profusely on the roadsides. The contrast between the gold of the wattle and the purple of the hardenbergia is beautiful…add in the brilliant blue of a variety of native blue bells with a carpet of the pale mauve to blue daisies of the native brachyscome and it is a truly entrancing sight.
In another town I visited a saw a large shrub to small tree covered in perfumed sprays of pale mauve flowers. Turns out it is a buddleja salviifolia. I have seen many buddlejas, but never one quite like this.
As yet I haven’t found time to visit the botanical gardens but hope to in the next few days. The nephew I am with is not really interested in plants and flowers unless they can be eaten by livestock!!
I hope you are all getting the gardens ready for the competition judging in a couple of weeks. Make sure to pick up a schedule from Bryson’s as I am sure you will find a category to enter.
