Wrist cuff giveaway and more

Jackie Cardy who blogs as dogdaisychains makes the most wonderful velvet and tweed wrist cuffs and brooches. She is asking for us all to help her with a market survey and will give away one of her beautiful wrist cuffs to someone. She needs at least 100 people to respond - you only have to measure your wrist - to make the survey viable so please click here to take part - and ask all your friends also. Then hope you will be the lucky winner!

I am having a quiet afternoon and evening as today has been another eye injection day. thankfully I don't seem to have much in the way of after effects at present, just the usual black bubble which should be gone by tomorrow morning. I am skipping next month though, I'm not running the risk of something going wrong just before Christmas!

I have been busy taking photos at the Gardens again. We are having a breakup for the Friends on Saturday night and will have a competition on a PowerPoint of recognising pictures of flowers or shrubs within the Gardens. While I was taking those I saw the magpie geese were on the lagoon. They are very large birds and look quite spectacular when they are flying in formation. There are also a few royal spoonbills there. For some reason we never seem to have the spoonbills with the yellow bills here.

These waterlilies are looking l ovely too. I love the little white ones which I hope you can see if this picture will enlarge. they are such tiny flowers and their lilypads are almost the same size as those of the blue ones.

This is taken inside the fernery, where we have a wonderful collection of bromeliads. I am starting to gather quite a collection of them in my own garden, they take almost no looking after, seem to be droughtproof, and only need the soil to hold them upright. I have a garden bed which has been invaded by the surface roots of a beautiful flowering Euodia ( I will post pictures when it flowers in January). I don't want to take out the tree, so we will use a mattock (small) to hack holes in the bed deep enough to anchor each of the broms. Then all they need is a bit of fertiliser a couple of times a year and the occasional hosing!

I looked at this variety of Bromeliad at the local market last weekend, but jibbed at the price they were asking - probably worth it, but I felt I would make do with a less exotic plant!

This is another lovely specimen also. We are very lucky at the Gardens as the local Bromeliad club come in several times a year and move plants around and generally look after them for the Gardens.

Hopefully tomorrow I will really get back to working on the pages for the tower book. I want to start on some more covers also, I received some Translucent liquid sculpey from Dale a few days ago and haven't had time to play with it yet.