Frary's Fresh Flowers

Well I've been back almost a week and it has been a miserable few days weather-wise, rain, rain... and then it rained some more. Until yesterday which was clear which meant that we had our first strong frost of the year - oh joy - winter is kicking in. Fortunately I ghad managed to move most of the fuchsias into the greenhouse so they might avoid freezing and last out the coming winte.
Brrrrrrr - I'm shivering already - and that is in the house after haviong the heating on all evening. How our new "Lipstick Vine" will survive I don't know. minimu temperature is supposed to be 13C well there's no way it will survive the winter in our house then. Not only is it a cold house (the walls are solid) but my wife has the abnnotying habit of leaving the top windows open during the day while she is out.
It does mean that the air is fresher but it also means that the house cools down during the day so that all that heat in the morning is totally wasted and then if yoyu don't get the windows closed early enough - before it gets dark (around 4pm in winter) then the hous freezes in the eveniong before the heating comes on.
But try telling my wife that (or my mother) and it's ignored - because she doesn't pay the damn heating bill that's why.

Well I can't see our new vine surviving even up until December so that's £7.98 wasted at B&Q - we bought it because the leaves were so unusual - they look like christmas bunting- those loop streamer things - fascinating.

Whaty do i expect to see when I get home tomorrow - well nothing really as it will be dark - the clocks have changed and I think that it is getting dark around 5:30, 6:00 pm in Aberdeen at the moment - definitely long before i get home.

however, based on last year, what do I expect to see before daughter Judy and her mob of rowers descend on us on Saturday (assuming I can force myself outside in the cold - it was 30C here in Tripoli today and i've never been a cold-weather flower... I'm definitely a tropical bloom albeit a hairy-leaved, small upside-down flowered tropical bloom).
Fuchsias - last year there were fuchsias blooming uuntil the middle of november and this year they should be in the greenhouse so wiith even better hardiness.
Pansies and violas - they are the big professional grower plants around this time of year and we have a few dotted around especially in the tubs.
Primulas and polyanthus - they were around this time last year - in fact polyanthus seem to be all year round flowers.
The end of the roses and the carnations - (before the frosts really start to kick in).
Possibly the verbascums might still be flowering and there may be a petunia or two around the place, or chrysanths - though I doubt that my wife will have taken them into the greenhouse - it is a huge tub for the chrysanths - and I hope she has left them out as they are supposed to be hardy and I'd like to give them a try in the stalag - the dwarf asters might be flowering insoide the stalag if the rabbits havent tunnelled in yet
I definitely expect a few great heather displays.
The dusty millers should be settled in and forming an edge to the path in the front - it will interesting to see if they survive the winter.

Anyhow I'm going to do a post with no poictures just for a change.

Something I have never truely studied is fungus - mushrooms and toadstools - but they are quite facinating and make great pictures. I'm thinking abouut them as I am due to return to Tipperty in a couple of days and don't know what will be in the garden. Also it has been very wet for the last six weeks and they are experiencing a warm spell at the moment (16C in October after the clocks have changed - very strange weather) so there may be a late flush of fungi in the garden and especially under the trees.
Okay maybe they aren't plants (though they are in common everyday speech) and they are flowers or fruit (though they are called fruiting bodies) and it's a good few years since I learnt anything about them but they are still interesting. I can well remember Jiurie's and mine excitement at seeing our first fly agaric by the side of the road out towards braemar.
Fly Agarics are the classic toadstools of fairy pictures - red with white spots.
I also remember picking and cooking puff balls from the fields in Seaton - exciting to see there shaggy caps for the first time and then to cook them in their own ink - not very tasty but still exciting.
None of these (from haughton country park in Alford in September) are that spectacular and look dull if you don't take the time to linger. If you do you start to apprciate the subtle colours, the strange structures and the texture like bread, meat  or pancakes of some of the common fungi.
This is something i will need to go into in future years - identification, photography and just a better understanding of our fungal friends.

The final few photos from Duthie park show something that you don't often see - at leastin the Uk or in Fiji - in fact i had never seen this in Fiji - the flower of Colocasia esculanta - that's taro, dalo or cocyam to you and me.  The reason you never see it in Fiji is that the plants are pulled up, the tops cut off and the root boiled and then the top replanted. That is the plant never grows big enough or is left undisturbed long enough for the flowers to form - though I'm sure they must do somewhere in a neglected garden or that the breeding stations. It is quite clearly an aroid flower like the lords and Ladies we have in our garden (a flower that I still haven't seen yet - probably it too hasn't grown big enough yet).

the lobnger we stay in Tipperty then the more wild flowers and garden escapees are showing up - more and more each year. I must stop using glyphispahte on the waste land and just do slash and burn each year - that way the "exotic native" plants will get to grow a bit and get recognised as newbies before we slash them down. It is quite amazing how many have turned up in just a few years - at least 4 or 5 this year.

Anywho - if you look in the background then you see something hiding - another of those items that the Winter Gardens is known for (in addition to Spike the talking cactus, and the croaking frog). it used to be a Loch Ness monster in the pool formed from a stream that flowed down from the main room, through the fernery finally to the croaking frog. The stream is still there as is the frog but the monster and the aroids have been moved into the steamy bromeliad room where the dalo is thriving.
As to Nessie - that has gained yellow spots and a bright grin. It looks sickly to me which isn't suprising as Loch Ness is neither hot or steamy. You have to be Fijian to be hoit and steamy.

As i said in a previous post this was just a quick visit to the Winter Gardens in Duthie Park - and my camera was just about to run out of battery so I could only take a few more pictures which meant that I could only take a few more shots. So i took two plants - an Euphorbia above and the Californian Poppies below.
The euphorbia shows the leaves at the top, real leafy leaves. Some cacti have leaves early on too which drop off and are replaced by spines as they are for the euphorbia. If you need to know more then well I guess that's back to Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphorbia. Euphorbia - the spurges - are a well known garden plant in the UK some of which are remarkably hardy even in up where we are in Aberdeen.

As to the Californian Poppies Eschscholzia californica below well they are currently available on T&M  as an annual.  http://www.thompson-morgan.com/seeds1/product/1277/1.html They are desert perennials and invaisive species in many hot places. Fortunately that doesn't apply in Aberdeen. They interested me because we have many self seeding yellow poppies in Tipperty and for a long time I thought they were Californian poppies but having seen these in the Winter gardens I aqm certain that we don't have Californian Poppies but Welsh poppies who are reknown for self seeding into walls (where they are in our garden.)

Finally i took a snap of Jiurie before we passed from the dry house into the bromeliad and orchid house. You can see how big some of the succulents have grown and I think a lot of them this end have been there for at least a decade maybe two or three. There are so many interesting plants in there that I could go back and get maybe a year's worth of posts.

As i mentioned in a previous post the very first succulents I ever grew were kalanchoe plantlets from Mr "Ratty" Roberts the biology teacher at Wintringham. The first cactus was a rat-tail cactus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disocactus_flagelliformis from a jumble sale while the first succulent (also from a jumble sale) was an aloe. At the time I would not have been able to tell you that it was Aloe humilis but now - 35 years later - I would be able to because there it is in the picture above. Not my particular specimen but identical to the first succulent I ever paid for all those years ago. As i said before I had a wee windowsill collection before i went off to Uni and then began my travels for work etc and I wonder if it is significant that only now am I starting another collection of cacti and succulents, - We had a few cacti in the council flat we lived in in Seaton Aberdeen - a few mammillaria and a couple of huge christmas and easter cacti (which we still had). However even though we were there for 20 years all told it didn't feel like home, wasn't ours. Now our place in tipperty does feel like homeso now I can start to do a bit of collecting because after the 40 years of travel I am settled again.
It won't be much of a collection because I have to suppress the collecting bug for money, commonsense, and time reasons, but it will be a wee collection.  And the reality of mortality kind of destroys the obsession behincollecting for me. There is no real reason to make a mega collection when I know that anything I do will be split up after I die, or even worse the plants, books, music or whatever will be throw away and destroyed when I'm gone. How pointless does that make collecting. It's a bugger this mortality thing.
When i was a teenager - well before i had any kids i guess - mortality wasn't an issue because that was way in the future - as it should be - no one would want kids to truely face the inevitability of death.  That was when i could be obsessive about collecing (and I was) - but now - now it just isn't worth it.
What a miserable post this is. Anywho below are some more piccies of some of the other succulents in the cactus house. Is "the cactus house" the name of a novel? Maybe it should be - maybe it will be.... let me just think of a plot - boy meets girls, boy loses girls, boy gets cactus collection, boy falls in love with talking cactus, talking cactus turns out to be an alien, alien turns out to be female, boy get girl, boy gets prickled to death, girl gets pricked to death, The end. it'll be a western, an underwater western. An underwater western with a tragic ending - like romeo and juliet meets the creature friom the black lagoon meets the man from Laramie - can you smoke cigarettes underwater? Underwater tobacco... involved in a range war between the tuna ranchers and the underwater tobacco farmers - the tuna and the seaweed should be friends....One of the girls is a mermaid. He's a fish rancher. This is all good stuff - I can see the movie now - bruce willis and tom cruise as the fish ranchers - brokeback swimming pool - rene zwellwigggg, rene zweleigg, rene zewl... halle berry as the mermaid, angelina jolie as the talking cactus, brad pitt as the underwater tobacco farmer - but he secretly want to be a tuna rodeo rider - oooh I'm excited... bring on the big production number with dancing sharks and woody allen.... no sean connery...  in a Carmen Miranda hat.

Where was I - the cactus house - the succulents - the piccies below - I really like the rossette shape of these succulents - it definitely appeals to the mathematical bent in my personality - and I do have a very bent mathematical side to me. The calm side, the logical side - hell - i just like the, okay.

Another raging torrent hits tipperty... okay it ain't the Philipines with two hurricanes in a week, or Western Samoa with a tsunami, or any of the other major disaster areas but it had us a wee bit worried - I got a call from Jiurie this morning about the burn getting close to the top again after a week of rain and a day of heavy drizzle.
We are well blessed for rainfall in Aberdeen compared to so many other parts of the world where they have either too much or tooo little. Now I won't go all geopolitical or anthropomorphic and say that there is no such thing as too much or too little rain - there just is rain and that the qualitative estimate of amount is based purely on humans - which it is - and that basically people often build their houses in the wrong place, which they do, but I won't. Nor will i get into the "if a tree falls in the forest does it make a noise" area (if there are no people in an area and it floods is it a disaster or is it just part of natures cycles) and I definitely won't go into global warming and climate change (because i reckon the jury is still out on what is happenig but that we better react like it is our fault anyway just in case it is) so I'll just say that it rained a lot recently in Aberdeen and today we were worried.
Worry and suffering is all relative and we have both seen enough of the world to know that our prob;ems are mere pinpricks compared to the problems of other but, well, they are our problems and so they give us something to worry about. Perhaps that is part of the human psyche - we are never happy, or never seem truely alive, unless we are worrying about something.

And of course the flowers help us not to worry about our tiny little troubles in a big world of woes. And there are some nice flowers in the garden at the moment. The wet wether is helping the transplanted primulas bed in well while there's still the end of the roses coming through before the first frost  and some of the calluna winter heathers are particularly attractive - beautiful pinks and mauves across the rockery. Also the leaves are falling quickly so by the time I get back next week everything that jiurie photographed to day will be covered in brown leaves and I'll have to spend my days raking up soggy leaves before i can see anything.
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According to one website i read Duthie Park Winter Gardens has the second biggest collecion of cacti under glass in the UK, and the 2nd biggest collection of bromeliads too. In both cases it is only beaten by the Eden project in Cornwall (still haven't been yet.
It is a really impressive house and above is the view as you leave the Victorian corridor to enter the house. Once inside there are at least a couple of hundred species in prime condition very well displayed. There used to be one extremely special cactus in there but that has fallen foul of budget cuts. It was a talking cactus - yes it really did talk. If there was a busy day with lots of kids in the cactus house then a large eye on a stalk would rise up from a barrel cactus (called Spike) about a meter in diameter, just next to a wooden fenced enclosure and the cactus would talk to the kids there - answer questions etc. I wonder how it did that - snigger.
Don't believe me - check out the facebook group dedicated to geting it reinstated "REINSTATE THE TALKING CACTUS IN DUTHIE PARK" - there 2391 members. Below are two pictures I've borrowed from the group - Spike the talking cactus.
The second one shows better the size of the greenhouse - it's a fair size.

They used to have a very big prickley pear Opuntia in the corner jiurie is walking towards in the first photo - big spikey pads. The first novel i wrote had a scene in the cactus house where the hero hid behind the cactus.
That big 'un disappeared a few years back but now they have one on the oppsite of the walkway (the plant above) and when we visited it was in bloom. It produced a couple of the nicest cactus flowers I have ever seen - a beautiful shafe of sherbet yellow. I like Opuntias because one of the first half dozen cacti I ever collected (was given by my mum - bought from a jumble sale I'm sure) was an opuntia that must have been 50 centimetres or so high.  Big pads on it about 15 cms (6 inches) in diameter. I think my ma soon came to hate it because it would always catch you when you tried to open the window. It's the small hairs (glochids) at the base of the spine that are the worse - they don't prick or scratch you like the 1 inch needle like thorns but they get into your skin and irritate you for hours.

So the opuntia flower - maybe 4 inches in diameter, sherbet yellow and almost papery in it's appearance. Mayb it's just me but the stigmas in the middle look like two little hands reaching up, grasping for something - maybe trying to tickle a bee into coming close so that they can grab it's pollen. maybe it is just me - could be grasping hands, or praying hands or begging hands.

Anywho the cactus house - one of the great things about living in Aberdeen.

After the climbers and creepers at Duthie park you can duck out and look at the japanese peace garden... hmm... built to commerate (is that the right word?)... recognise the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bomb. Hmm... there used to be a japanses garden on the other side of the corridor which was much nicer. It may still be there - we only had a quick visit last time because it was the enmd of the day and my parents were a bit on the tired side after they had trapsed around Aberdeen and going into a zillion and one charity shops. Oh yeah a quick visit so I didn't really have chance to have a good brows like I normallydo.this may not even be the commerative garden. If it is there is another interpretation of Japanese culture that does nothing for me (like the bonsais from a few days ago.) In my eyes this looks more like weirmacht and plaine concrete than it does Japanese. There used to be a parrot and chickens, and pheasants out this side of the corridor but no more.
Anyhow after this disappointment I went back into the cooler corridor with perennial bedding plants of begonias and pelagoniums (not geraniums note) - much more my style although the only flower which really caught my eye was a dark pelagonium. It looked much nicer close up and was actually quite unimpressive en-masse. Bedding plants are usually the other way round - nice en masse but unremarkable close up.
See what you think.

After the cooler corridor there is the Victorian corridor which has been recently restored but which I have already posted about so I won't linger this time. The piece-de-resistance is then coming - the Cactus house.

Back to Duthie Park Winter Gardens in Aberdeen again. From the main entrance there are several corridors that run off in different directions. We took the tropical shrub one which has many, many exotic tropical beauties in it - as you can see from the first photo. As I said yesterday there is much there that reminds me of Fiji, and of Grimsby and now there are plants that remind me of Libya - now that I have 2 years of Libya under my belt. Strangely there is nothing that reminds me of Angola. For some reason i don't associte the three years i spent in Soyo with plants - okay one year was offshore so you wouldn't expect plants and offshore to be associated but I spent over 2 years working in the Soyo base at the mouth of the Congo on shore but nope - nothing... at a push the sensitive plant which was a coomon weed, and maybe the water hyacinth which would float by just before the Congo hit the sea.... I must look out those photos but nothing really sticks out. I asociate Soyo, Angola more with animals particularly birds - the palm eagles, the ibises, wooly-necked storks, - and insects - water scorpions, preying mantis, swarming ants. Funny that - it had never occured to me before today.
Anywho - back to Duthie park. There is a brochure at the front door which I hoped would be online but I can''t find it and the most information I have found about the park and the gardens are on this website - http://www.scottishrecipes.co.uk/duthiepark.htm As i said there are now some plants that remind me of libya - there is the carrionflower which I noted in a previous post and there is also the bindweed Convolvulus (or possibly Calystegia)shown above. A similar plant is running through the Flame trees opposite the office and blooming at the moment. They are a very vibrant blue/purple that almost glows among the green leaves.

Two other climber/shrubs caught my eye in the corridor (apart from the Hibiscuses) but at the moment I have no idea what they are. nThe firat is a very thick petalled flower that is kind of fuchsia like. It almost looks plastic and artifical.
As does the second which ich is a red and yellow plastic hook shaped flower. It doesn't look real and I don't think the flowers were fully open when I snapped them. Apologies for the lack of botanical information on these last two. The photos are presented purely for entertainment.