Finding the right bloom

Yesterday as I walked back down the path to our house I noticed how much better our neighbour’s crocosmia were looking compared with our own plants. And I noted it down in my blip memory for a future blip. What I like about these flowers is their harp like structure.

Today I decided to photograph them and found that overnight they were all beginning to wilt. As our plant is quite large, I looked at it in more detail to see if there were any blooms in reasonable shape. Eventually I found one in the middle of another bush that was in reasonable fettle. The dark leaves of the bushes vegetation helped to isolate it nicely. However, I struggled to hold open the vegetation sufficiently to get an image as I was taking it handheld and as you can see have clipped the bottom edge of the bloom. I would have done much better had I bothered to use a tripod then I would have had both hands available to hold the leaves back. So much for shortcuts !

By the way I blipped this last year and mistakenly identified it as a freesia but have since recognized that freesias only bloom from one side of the stem. It is actually crocosmia 'lucifer'.