Africanaussie

This plant, called a desert rose, has been one of the shining stars in my garden. Appropriately, in South Africa it is called a Sabi Star!  It always seems to be flowering, and although I bought it very long and lanky it does now seem to be putting out some branches. Such lovely flowers. Then I noticed something the other day - it is putting out a seed pod, oh no!  not just one seed pod but lots of them!  I had heard that in order to capture the seeds you need to place the seed pod in a paper bag.  Gosh with all these seed pods I am going to have a paper bag tree!   I have a little one in the side of the pod that was grown from a seed - I got it from an open garden a year or so ago.  If anyone in Australia would like some seeds, just e-mail me at  vemvaan@gmail.com.  I am not sure how long it will take, but the story is that when these seed pods explode thousands of tiny seeds are ...

I read about this vine on a Florida blog a  year or so ago (I think it was Floridagirl) and was excited to see one on the clearance rack, so snapped it up.  It suffered badly during our wet season - I could never see the bugs, but something was madly attracted to its leaves.   A couple of months back I cut it right back and it began to send out some branches and this time the leaves stayed, and then I was excited to see some little white flowers.  Oh pretty, I thought, but in the back of my mind I had thought there was some red involved in the flowers - then I saw little red buds appearing at the base of the flowers. Then some of the  red flowers opened up - how cool is that!   I am so glad I persisted with this vine.  It is called a bleeding heart vine.