Nitidissima in Flower - June 2011
On wandering the garden this morning to pick blooms for our Open Days this weekend, guess what we found! A flower on C. Nitidissima!
This is the first of about a dozen buds to open. Beautiful colour and form – about 5cm across with recurved petals and a big boss of bright gold stamen. Both the buds and the flower colour are a lot stronger than the last time we photographed it six years ago as a very young plant.
Sadly our attempts to propagate it have been largely unsuccessful. We had five cuttings strike two years ago and they grew for almost a year, but then they all gradually died. We will try again!
Beautiful day today, check your flower buds for bud grubs – we found two today – they eat the centre out of the buds and spoil the flower. Now is the time to dis-bud if you wish to get better quality blooms. Just twist off every second bud.
Have a great time in the garden – don’t forget you can see us at Maleny ‘Gardening on the Edge’ next weekend – 11/12 June. We are having lots of people visit us here on our open days – we are open all this weekend and next weekend, 8.00am-3.00pm Saturday and Sunday.
