POINSETTIA CHRISTMAS

One of my friends said the other day, "You can never have too many poinsettias."
So I have taken that as permission to post the best of my poinsettia collection as a pictorial Christmas card.

This one I photographed on my walk this morning - it was lovely to see the actual flowers which are normally so insignificant.

The next few I found in a local garden centre where I bought this year's plant.

Then there are those adorning balconies all over Tenerife . . .

. . .  an entire hedge of the pompom variety between a banana plantation and the road . . .

. . . and a less showy variety in a garden near us.

This last picture is a close-up of our poinsettia from 2012 which came back to life and put on a brave show earlier this year, then turned up its toes (roots?) last month. We assume this was a deliberate built-in obsolescence - a ploy to make us buy another one.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!!

SHOW AND TELL SUNDAY

poinsettia

First things first - apologies for absence. I have been busy lately rewriting a novel - I'll tell you about that another time - and my blogs have been infrequent, to say the least. So I have decided to kick-start it again with a "Show and Tell Sunday", and if I have any followers and visitors left, please leave a comment to encourage me to continue!


Christmas is coming in Tenerife as well as the rest of the world, and one of our first signs is the poinsettias coming back to full colour in the gardens. We also have Los Reyes - The Kings - waiting on the roundabout to be lit up at night.


For those of you who have been following the avalanche story - here is this morning's set of photographs.
When the workmen told me it would take twenty days, they should have added 'probablemente' - this is manana country, after all!


People have been blaming the rock-fall on the heavy rain we had two days earlier - our first in over a year - but I think it is more likely to be due to the banana plantation perched on top. This is a closeup of the cliff through which they cut the access road when building the autopista 25 or so years ago -  Huge rocks, so heavy that I cannot lift a head-sized one - interspersed with gravel layers riddled with holes in which the local pigeons nest.

Twenty-five years of steadily-seeping water - we are lucky there wasn't a school built at the base of the cliff.

Steady as a rock? I will never use that phrase again without visualising this - and  yes, that side road really IS that steep!

CLOSE-UP

I have been neglecting my blog lately but I have two good reasons - one is that the A-Z Challenge used up all my blogging energies for a while, and the other is that I am concentrating on finishing the re-write about which I told my readers during the April Blog Slog.

Anyway, just to keep it ticking over, here are a few photos I took this week.

The first one is of course an estrelizia - strelitzia in the UK or Bird of Paradise flower, This is the most perfect one I've seen blooming on my morning walks recently.


I have also been experimenting with close-ups - the first photo is of poinsettia flowers that have appeared on last Christmas's plant which is now bursting into new life.

Then there's one of the OH's cherished chilli plants - this one starts out purple and slowly ripens through yellow and orange to red. The plant can look stunning with all the colours and the white flowers at the same time, but at the moment it looks a bit pathetic. then there's rosemary, a pretty red leaved thing and a succulent - I love the squareish leaves on this one.

 and finally, guess who had to get in the picture?

BAH ! HUMBUG !!

It's here!
Christmas.
It's unavoidable.
We went to buy plant-pot dishes to go underneath the two ficus that survived being ripped out by the incompetent gardeners the community employed, and we were surrounded by polar bears.

So we bought a poinsettia to display on our terrace table. I shall have to get out the rope lights as well now, to show we're joining in the spirit of Christmas.

When we got home there were three Christmas cards in the letter-box. 'Oh bother!' I cried. Once again I've been caught with my pants down - I haven't sent even one card yet.

Bah! Humbug!