Wordless Wednesday: prickles

Tags

blue rinse, Cacti, cactus for sale, Cadiz, not beautiful enough?, prickles, wordless wednesday

Friday 13th: now for something completely different

Tags

Cacti, cala lily, flower carpet, Friday, Joy, pointsettia, slides to digital

Flowering Cactus, competing with a rather snazzy dress.

Cala Lily

The months of January and February, deepest Winter, can be a drag, what with the nasty weather and short daylight hours.  One of the jobs I am tackling presently is to archive a collection of slides which belonged to a friend and neigbour of mine called Joy.

Joy travelled extensively all her life and the slides cover a period of about fifteen years between the mid 1950s and the early 1970s when she was a young woman working for the British government and then an oil company. The images are mainly of South America, Afganistan and Europe.  A keen walker, a great number of her images are of mountain ranges. Joy seemed to love the flora and fauna as much as she did the local people and their customs.  So today when most of the the United kingdom is under snow and ice, I thought these images might help to warm you up.

Clearly appreciative of the native plant life

When planting alpines and the label calls for “free draining” this is what I need to have in mind.

Some of slides are labelled and it is rather nice for me to see that some of those which she took the trouble to label are the plant ones:

Poinsietta, not just for Christmas. 

Then there are these:

My favourite of the pictures Joy took of the making of the flower carpet is this next one of the Garda put on watering duties.  Certainly looking at the smart attire of all the onlookers I should imagine there was little else for them to do.

I hope you are feeling warmer now and perhaps your thoughts will now turn to  holiday plans.  

Stay lucky on this Friday.

Sun, sea and …….

Tags

Agave, Cacti, Mallorca, Oleander, Palm trees, Succulents

Sun, Sea and Succulents…….(bet you were hoping for something different there). I love Mallorca for many reasons, not least for its wonderful climate, tapas, local wines and landscape, its great city, Palma, and of course its plant life.  

Those towering Palm trees photographed for many a postcard, run along beach fronts, in gardens and line roadsides, their long shadows providing welcome shade. 

Great big prickly pears, Opuntia, can be seen growing on the side of the road, often against tumble down abandoned houses, and I understand that these were planted by peasants because its distinctive smell kept away insects from the outside loo “facilities”! The fruit which ripens in summer is used as food for pigs or made into a jelly.  Other road side plants are Oleanders, a colourful show of pinks or whites softening the infrastructure.

Olives, Almond, Carob and Citrus trees grow to proportions we can only dream about.           Big Olive/ small car.

We were lucky enough to be given a crate of oranges upon arrival and used them to keep us supplied in freshly squeezed juice each morning.  If only we could bottle that smell for the depths of Winter.

Bougainvilleas are planted along walls and  scramble over boundaries all over the Island, their distinctive colour dazzles in the bright light.  In the evening light, sheep got to work with a little light pruning, seeming to be rather partial to a pink snack.

Hibiscus are knockout show stoppers and as much as I love to see “Oiseau bleu” here in Blighty they really do not compare with these:

There is fennel, self seeded on the road sides wafting its liquorice like aroma in the warm air. Rosemary, Lavender, all wonderful, but my love is a Succulent. There is something really great about the way that they thrive in baking conditions, never asking for anything, putting up with little or no water. To me they look fabulous, shades of green, grey, terracotta, with or without a soft grey down, like velvet or peach skins.

 

Many inhabitants on the Island live in flats with perhaps only a small window box or balcony to grow anything in, some just use the space around the front door to satisfy the need for a plant or two.

Then there are the more architectural  Agave and Cacti which in this setting look worthy of admiration rather than those dusty,somewhat sad looking varieties on chilly dark window cills of Suburbia.I love the way the spine of needles on a new Agave leaf leaves its imprint on the surface of its outer neighbour.  And these Agave grow to mammoth proportions, this is quite a small one, broken off and placed next to crockery to show scale.

These pictures were taken on holiday and understandably will not make it into the family album, here’s hoping you like them.

I would be interested to learn the names of any of the succulents, so should you happen to be in the know, send me a message via the comments section.