Saturday 16 April 2011

A bit of gardening

Everyone very busy planting at the Botanic Gardens this morning - at last it is dry enough to get into garden beds!  I think everyone was so thrilled to have some fine weather we had a wonderful rollup to help put about 800 small plants in the ground!  As usual I provided smoko - and as usual - I was welcomed warmly when I arrived with the trolleys!

This will look better if you enlarge it - I have finally got the native violets again after losing my clump a couple of years ago.  They are such pretty little flowers aand make a wonderful ground cover in semi-shady areas.  I am not sure how long I will be able to keep them in a hanging basket though.

For some reason this plant is known as Swedish Ivy, but it is really plectranthus Australis - so no connection with Sweden and it is not an ivy.  It is so hardy, I have had this for about 30 years at least now, it gets almost no attention and has only been repotted a couple of times - I don't know why it keeps rewarding me with lovely glossy green foliage and occasional bursts of flowers!
This is the April page I made for Angela in England, but it had to travek by a very roundabout route as I stupidly sent it to the wrong person by mistake!.  Angela at last received it this week.  Her theme is flowers.

We apparently had an earth tremor measuring 5.4 on the Richter scale about 3.30 pm, with the epicentre only a couple of hundred kilometres north of here - I didn't feel anything and Bill was just waking up after a nap (he needed it after working hard this morning).  Nikki said the cupboards all shook at their house in Walkerston.  I think I was burrowing into the bottom of our chest freezer looking for a particular bundle of meat about then so I probably thought any shaking was just to do with that!  However I see that Christchurch has had another aftershock - they don't need that at all.
Time to get ready for our barbecue dinner - have to make the most of the fine weather, we are sure to get some more rain soon.

4 comments:

  1. The Gardens will look wonderful when all those plants have established themselves. Love the violets and ivy. Your April page is beautiful and was worth waiting for! Glad your tremor was no stronger and hope no damage was done anywhere.

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  2. I can imagine you are MOST welcome with the morning tea trolley Robin. Everyone looks so industrious. Love the travelling page, and at least it arrived at the correct home eventually. Isn't the earthquake news a little frightening!! There seems to be a lot of unrest going on above and below the earth's surface at the moment.

    I love the plants, and many people have the 'swedish ivy' here too, it's a must have for shady corners.

    Take care, and try not to disappear into that freezer.... Having had to hunt for meat in deep freezes for yonks, I understand the situation!!

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  3. The violets are gorgeous, so delicate. I'm glad that you didn't suffer from the earthquake.

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  4. That's the way to get gardening done. Nice April page. Thanks for commenting on my blog.

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