Giving Flowers

In the last two weeks I have picked flowers for so many occasions.  It has caused my mind to wander about the gift of flowers.  I can think of no other gift that is appropriate for congratulations, and commiserations, to celebrate and to encourage.  We use them in weddings and funerals.  They are given to celebrate birth and to sympathise in death.  Flowers say "I love you", "I'm sorry" and "Thankyou".  They say "Welcome Home" and "Goodbye".  I find it quite amazing!

A friend recently passed on a book called "The Language of Flowers"  by Vanessa Diffenbaugh.  It was a great read!  It is based on the Victorian idea of expressing thoughts and feelings through the gift of flowers.  The Victorians had a very sophisticated flower language.  I want to do some more exploring in this area now - I've been inspired!  At the back of the book was a paraphrased list of flowers and the meanings assigned to them through this floral language.  Of course, I was keen to look up Protea, and was really surprised by its meaning.

Proteas mean courage.

I rather like their meaning!

I'm Having a GIVEAWAY!

Welcome to my first giveaway!  We are celebrating spring, and new beginnings.  We've changed our name officially to Swallows Nest Farm and we want the world to know!  And who doesn't love a giveaway?! For those of you who don't know, as well as running Swallows Nest Farm, I am also a practicing artist as well as having an online shop called trees4thewood where I sell small artworks and handmade cards, all inspired by the flowers and birds here on the farm.  Yes, life is full, but I love it.  

And I love it when everything comes together too!  In the shop, this years Christmas cards are based on the beautiful Tasmanian Waratah that I featured in the previous post,  and seeing as we've officially changed our name (we were previously trading as Parson's Bay Proteas - boring huh?!) we thought we'd celebrate with a giveaway.

So what's the prize, you ask?  You get

Set of 6 professionally printed postcards of flowers from Swallows Nest Farm

Pack of 5 handmade Tasmanian Waratah Christmas Cards from trees4thewood

Pack of 3 Welcome Swallow Fancy Edged Note Cards from trees4thewood

A hand painted Tasmanian Waratah bookmark from trees4thewood

Thats a prize worth $50+!!!  

What do I have to do to win this fabulous package, I hear you ask?!?

Thats simple!  I'm using Rafflecopter to run the giveaway.  There are three ways you can enter - and if you do all three, you get three entries! Entries are open for three weeks. Follow the prompts below and good luck! 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Tasmanian Waratahs

This week, I picked my first Tasmanian Waratahs for the season.  I have one bush that flowers in late October - just a bit earlier than the rest.  Almost over night, it seemed to be covered in bright red blooms.

Most people associate the Waratah with New South Wales, probably because its is that states floral emblem, but Victoria and Tasmania are also home to some wonderful species of waratah.  At Swallows Nest Farm, we are lucky to be growing the waratah endemic to Tasmania called Telopea Truncata. It is a smaller flowered plant to its mainland cousins, but size isn't everything!  The Tassie waratah is about the size of a carnation and looks a bit like a cross between a "normal" waratah and a grevillea.  It has lovely bent styles the give it a charming sculptural quality.

The Tasmanian Waratah grows as a large shrub to 3 m, but can that can get to over 8 metres tall.  In the wild, it grows in wet forest areas and flowers in November and December.  It is often picked in the wild for the flower trade. The flowers are striking red making the bush really stand out when its in bloom.  Very rarely, the flowers are actually yellow.  The yellow form has been used to make hybrid waratahs which are available to purchase as garden plants called "Shady Lady Yellow".  It is the only waratah to have a yellow variation.  

I love it that these cheery Tasmanians are ready to pick in the lead-up to Christmas.  As a flower grower, its the plants that help to mark the seasons and this one is such a lovely Christmassy flower.  It brightens up a bouquet and compliments the other flowers that are available in the Christmas season. 

The Tasmanian Waratah is best propagated by seed.  After the plant has flowered it produces some fantanstic seed pods.  I'm a bit of a collector of seed pods and waratah seed pods are definitely worth collecting!


Look out for Tasmanian Waratahs in your florist or in the wild during November and December.  They are a real treat and a great reminder that Christmas is fast approaching!

If you'd like to have a go at growing your own Tasmanian Waratah, you can buy fresh seed collected from Swallows Nest Farm here.

More Waratahs

Spring is definitely upon us here in Southern Tasmania.  There are beautiful warm days with glorious blue skies, followed by bitterly cold days with snow and hail, and ferocious winds.  The grass is thickening and lush green, and there is a smell in the air that promises summer.  

At Swallows Nest farm, the flower thats getting the most attention is still the Waratah.  We have a few  varieties - there are the large early flowering ones, and then the later pinkish ones.  We have some late flowering rich reds and some wonderful Wirrimbirra White.  They flower from September through to October and into November when the Tasmanian Waratah, Telopea Truncata, starts to flower.  

I came across the following picture on the internet recently and thought it was a wonderful use of a pink waratah.  I certainly hadn't seen them in a bouquet like this before.  Our white waratahs are popular for wedding bouquets, but these look fabulous and striking too.  Great idea.

Of course, as the rest of our waratahs begin to pop, I will be putting up pictures of them.  The differences in varieties can be quite amazing. 

The other news is that I'm planning a small giveaway! Stay tuned - details will follow ...

Maui Sunset

The next spring flowering Leucadendron I'm featuring this year is this gorgeous blushing beauty called Maui Sunset.  It's creamy white bracts are tinged with delicate pink and the shape is almost rose-like.  For most of the year, Maui Sunset is a fairly unremarkable green.  

There is a tinge of brownish pink, but its not what you'd call a "stand-out" colour.  Over winter, the pinkish tinge begins to increase, and the green slowly starts to lighten. 

By late winter, these lovely leuco's have thrown off their cloak of invisibility and are definitely beginning to shout "look at me"!  But they continue to lighten until they are almost white, glowing, and rimmed with pink.  The ridge along the top of the hill where they grow is transformed.

Maui Sunset are not widely found in florists.  They don't have the same long stems that other leuco's have.  I think the colour and beauty of them make up for the shorter stems!  We often leave some of our bushes uncut and allow them to grow two seasons, giving them a multi headed stem with longer length.    Then, they are really useful in larger bunches.  

The Maui Sunset on top of the basket above show how this second years growth give the effect of many flowers on one stem.  I picked 6 or 7 stems here, and each stem had 3 or 4 flowers on it.  

The spectacular colour transformation of these Maui Sunset are a very obvious sign of the change of season around the farm, and their effect is so cheery and bright - they are definitely a spectacular spring flowering Leucadendron.  

The Waratah's Are Out

Today, I picked my first Waratah of the season.  What a stunning flower, the Waratah is.  It is an Australian Native, and the floral emblem of New South Wales.  We grow a number of different Waratah or Telopea hybrids at Swallows Nest.  They are characterised by their long (up to 1 metre) strait stems, and large red showy flowers that are long lasting.  

The Waratah is from the Proteaceae family and grows from a lignotuber, a swelling in the root crown that acts as a protection from fire.  The plant stores nutrients and buds in the lignotuber, and can sprout from below ground level.  Because of this, cutting the flowers of a Waratah encourage more stems to sprout until you get a very bushy plant with many many stems.  Some cut flower growers have very prolific plants producing up to 400 stems each, in a season.  Ours are not quite up to that yet, but we are working on it!  

Over summer the plant focuses on producing stems.  Each stem forms a single bud.  Then over late winter the bud begins to swell.  

Over a period of weeks, they begin to open and reveal the flower.  Waratahs seems to slowly unpack themselves in stages.  The outer "petals" are actually modified leaves called bracts.  Inside the bracts are many small flowers arranged in a dome shape to form what we think of as the Waratah flower.  These individual little flowers seem to unfold and arrange themselves in the recognisable domed shape before they start to actually open.  

You can see in the picture above how the little flowerets begin to open at the outside and work their way to the middle of the dome.  

A tip for buying or picking Waratahs is to select ones that have just begun to open their little flowerets.  This will usually start on the sunny side of the plant.  Once a few of styles are open, they are ready to pick.  This will give them a much longer vase-life.  When buying Waratahs, look for ones that are not completely open.  This will give you longer to enjoy them.

At Swallows Nest Farm, we have a number of different varieties of hybrid Waratahs.  The first flowers usually appear in early September, and later flowering varieties keep appearing until mid to late December. We have some beautiful white ones too, which I'll feature when they start to flower in a few weeks.  

These popular flowers are a wonderful bold statement that spring is here!

Flower Show Time

Spring is Flower Show time in Tasmania and our District School hosts our local flower show.   I  have always felt that, as a local flower grower, I really should be involved in a local flower show! But because of various reasons beyond my control, I have never actually been to see our local show until this year.  I was also able to be involved, by donating a few bunches for fund raising.  

I had fun doing a quick pick, mostly of the vibrantly coloured spring flowering Leucos.  I probably should have taken the trailer, because my poor old faithful picking basket got so over-full that I nearly broke it!

Simple bunches of Leucadendrons in cheap and cheerful plastic wrap were snapped up.  I also did simple bunches of Protea Neriifolia, which are looking particularly fabulous at the moment.  They all sold out before I got to the show.  

I had a lovely time looking at the Daffodil exhibits, with some amazing variations that I've never seen before. 

 There were also some stunning floral arrangements.  Having checked out the competition, so to speak, I'm considering entering an arrangement in next years flower show!  I'm sure you'll hear all about it when it do!

We've Struck Gold

Please excuse the cheesy title of this post, but this beautiful spring flowering leucadendron is called Safari Goldstrike.  I wrote about it earlier in the year.  It was our first new planting after we took over the protea farm 4 years ago, and it has been a great success.  This year is the first big harvest, with the plants beginning to produce lots of saleable stems.  If you want to see the before and after shots, click on the link.

For most of the year, Safari Goldstrike are a green leaucadendron with a slightly pink tip, as seen in the photo above.  Many florists use them at this stage.  They are long lasting and a great accent flower, the green really glowing among soft pastels, or natives. 

You can see them being used above in this native arrangement.  Depending upon the weather conditions, sometime in August these unassuming leuco's decide its their time to shine, and they begin to change colour and open into the large golden blooms that give them their name.  

They really glow with colour and their large, teacup shaped flowers just shout "look at me".  

We are so proud of these great flowers - our first planting.  They are versatile all year round, but are definitely a spectacular spring-flowering leucadendron.

Truly Tasmanian - The Pineapple Candle Heath

Meet the Pineapple Candle Heath, or Richea Dracaphylla,  a truly Tasmanian flower.  When I first discovered this plant, I thought it looked like it should be a tropical bloom - some type of rainforest rarity that could be feasted on by colorful tropical birds.  But its home is the temperate rainforest slopes of Mount Wellington and other high altitude rainforests - moist and cold, the soil wet with snow-melt and a dense canopy of trees over head.  It is endemic or native to Tasmania.  These flowers have been harvested in the wild, but at Swallows Nest we have some wonderful well established plants that are able to be pruned and trained to produce lovely long stems.  

Pruning these plants is no mean feat!  They are as spiky as they look and very dense.  Gloves are required!  But the effort is worth it when the lovely long stems produce beautiful tall flower spikes.  Flowering time is usually the spring months but we often get flowers here much earlier - July and August.  Flowers can also surprise us at other times of the year, but August is usually when they are really starting to bloom in earnest.   

The spiky leaves, about 20cm long, spiral up the stem and the flower emerges from the crown of the spiral.  These flowers are sometimes called Riceflower, because of the obvious likeness.   The rice-looking part is actually the petals of the flower that are fused together.  They fall off when the stamen in mature.  These petals are grouped together and sheathed by bracts that often carry a pink or red tinge.  

In this picture, you can just see the flower starting to emerge from the spiral of leaves on the stem.  

In this picture, you can see how the bracts surround the petals.  There are some petals peeping out on the left.  The bract will open and eventually fall off.

Richea Dracophylla, or Pineapple Candle Heath are a very architectural flower - a strong bold shape.  But they can also be softened by adding them to other natives.  They are a beautiful and unusual flower - uniquely Tasmanian.