All these vibrant hibiscus are flowering at the moment in the old gardens adjacent to the residential village where I now live …
Most of the residents living in the old village have gone but their gardens live on. Seems to me from this show that hibiscus are hardy and forgiving.
Another pretty flowering shrub in the old section of the village. I hate the idea that all these will be lost when the wreckers are sent in.
Of course I could go in there and get a bunch of cuttings but I already have a dozen plants that I care about on my balcony and the new gardens are a different style and not mine.
I’m pretty sure I have the name right this time. This cheery overgrowth of wild colour would’ve been a weed in most other places, but here and now in the wilderness of abandoned gardens, it’s a joy to see.
Interestingly, its seeding habit reminds me of the seed habit of the plant all bush-walkers and probably most farmers love to hate. I’m talking of the Australian weed, Farmers’ Friends.
It only needs one knee high plant to catch on your clothes, and you’re picking clingy seeds off for the next three weeks.
One old farmer I once knew, used to have to spend quite a bit of time picking seeds off his socks, since he nearly always forgot to wear his ‘shock absorbers’.
I’ve forgotten the punchline of the joke or pun this name referred to, but they are the little elasticized “skirts” people wear around their ankles, over their socks and tops of their boots. Let me know why they are called shock absorbers?
The old man, when he’d collected a 1 litre yoghurt container full of Farmers’ Friends seeds would throw them in the stove fire. The seeds hang together like velcro, so its easy to pick them up in one bunch.
However, these are Cosmos seeds heads. But if you know what Farmers Friends look like, you’ll see the likeness.
PS, that’s a shockingly bad photo, so out of focus it’s not funny. That’s one problem with composing a post on the mobile, with the photo merely being edited with the Apple editing software. I don’t like it. Probably I’ll go through the whole rigmarole of emailing the photo to myself, editing it using decent software and re-posting it.
This excellent gerbera… in the wilderness that was the original village here.
When I take a photo from my balcony there is always first the roof over the BBQ area that I aim to miss, then the old olive green grey roofs of the single storey cottages that made up the old village, Carinya.
While only a few people still live there and itis generally a ghost town, the name is still often used, and a number of activities are run in Carinya’s community complex.
I haven’t explored over there yet although the Librarian at Parkland (the new community complex) said to me that if I liked old books, there are hundreds at Carinya. Kind of a red rag to an old reader, if you know what I mean.
When I was out the other day, after I had sat down in the civilized new-ness of the one year old addition to the village and found it too structured for my mood, I walked into the old section.
This village started in the the 1980s with a field of little villas surrounding a community facility. About half the villas remain along with the old communal areas.
So I crossed the vacant block along the concrete path. Weed central but with more flowers than the sculptural resort style gardens in the newer sections …
There’s even a lone fungal fruiting body. Further on, as I come into the streets, the vacancies and their bewildered gardens become obvious. (A pun there)
Can barely see the villas for the overgrown gardens. A riot of flowers though. More varieties of hibiscus that I’ve seen in one small area.
There are some beautiful trees and shrubs, five to ten metres tall. I can’t imagine they’ll be kept when the building program continues.
Finally, in a derelict corner I see a clump of fungi. I had been wondering whether these gardens were maintained by the establishment or cultivated by the residents themselves. The fungi speak for the latter.
Three, possibly four species I make that. What do you think, mycophiles?
These almost-gone tulips startled me with their sere beauty. A good metaphor for how I feel sometimes … almost-gone; learning to love myself in better times and worse.
The previous couple of weeks or three I sat around with a cold, fatigue, a heart scare, more fatigue. Knitting was it while I was forced to sit around. Fatigue is a thing to be borne. There’s no hurrying it. It can be calculated. Six days of sickness, 12 days of fatigue.
In between all that, I spent the day in an Emergency Department to have my heart checked. Which meant blood tests and an ultrasound on my legs to check for blood clots. Nothing eventuated. It was just a scare, that’s all, I was told. These are the kind of diagnoses meant to comfort a patient.
This patient went home, not forgetting to ask for a copy of the the blood tests. Getting that was the best part of the day. The blood results confirmed to me that my continuing semi-isolation is in a good cause. My white blood cells are still well below what’s needed to fight off disease, platelets also very low, and red blood cells only just dragging themselves into the average range.
Rita de Heer 