Flower Friday. : : Grevillea 'Loopy Loo'

Determined to find a real flower from the garden, I made it out the door today. With the weather wildly veering between sunny and mild, freezing and sunny and windy and rainy, the poor plants soldier on. The roses were just pruned, so they probably won't bloom until June , some of the desert plants, like the agaves, bloom only once in their lifetime, and others, like the aloes have been stunning for a couple of weeks now.

 I managed a trip up the stairs to the terrace and found rosemary full of two different kinds of bees. I've never seen bumblebees here before, but this year there are lots of them. The lizards are beginning to emerge from their crevices in the rock walls and do push ups in the sun. There is a ground cover that looks like a carpet of daisies which OilMan informs me is a variety of chrysanthemum, but I was in no mood to get down to ground level to photograph it.

We have what sounds like a hundred frogs, but is probably only a pair, living in our fountain by the front steps. When they get going at night they are quite the chorus and they make us smile. I went out today to see if I could see them in there, but they were well concealed...However I noticed that the grevillea under the kitchen window has suddenly burst into bloom. There are hundreds of varieties of grevillea but I was particularly charmed to read that the Australian name for this version, whose blooms are at least 6 inches long, is 'LoopyLoo' Perfect. Just how I feel....