This is one of many pages describing plants and animal life
that we have in our garden. In many cases, we don't know what they are. Comments welcome.
By default the photos on this page are relatively small (“thumbnails“). Click
on them to get progressively larger photos.
These are various daisy-like flowers. I think I've identified most of them. They all appear
to belong to the order Asterales, and
most belong to the
genus “Aster”.
I originally included the Gazanias here too; there are still
a number of plants which deserve their own page, and this page will change further.
Osteospermum
These flowers are Osteospermum, also
known as Cape daisies.
We didn't think about it much, and the fact wasn't blooming much seemed normal for mid-winter.
It took me over a year to even take real photos of it; but it became clear that, with a little
water, it was completely transformed. It has bloomed profusely almost continually from
September 2007 to August 2008, drooping a little in early December as it got warmer and before
we had enough water for it to recover. Now that it's getting regular water, I suspect it'll
bloom the year around. Here comparison photos taken on 19 June 2007 and a
year later on 31 May 2008:
After some research, I came to the incorrect conclusion that there is no such thing as a daisy
bush in most parts of the world—we had one in Wantadilla, but
it didn't get watered and thus bloomed only in the spring. I thus assumed that it was some
kind of Olearia, but Laurel Gordon put me
right and confirmed that it's a Marguerite daisy. Here some more recent detail photos:
There were a number of these bushes in far too cramped conditions, so on 2 August 2008 I transplanted two of them to a border to the south-east paddock:
There was a second one in the garden, which bloomed yellow, but which looked old and not very
happy, so we pulled it out. That didn't stop it, of course, and in June 2008 we found a number of shoots which we transplanted. We'll see
how that goes. They're a bit lop-sided; hopefully they'll pick up when they have space to
grow.
