Winter Cheer

It’s winter here, and though in Melbourne we don’t get snow, it does get very grey and cold and wet and dreary. And a bit depressing.

I often used to get my mother a plant for Mother’s Day — usually a cyclamen or a flowering begonia, and last year, in May, I bought myself a red cyclamen. It lasted for months and months and I found it really cheered me up.  I’d come out into the living room and the morning sun would be shining on my plants lined up along my wide window sill — and if there was no sun, just grey gloom, the cheerful red flowers of the cyclamen really brightened the day.

Now in the new house I not only have a couple of cyclamens in bloom, I have this gorrrrgeous red zygocactus (aka Christmas cactus) that a friend  gave me when I moved in. She gave me two — both of which she’d grown from cuttings from her own plants. The first one to flower was the lovely soft pink one that I blogged about in May.

As soon as that one finished flowering, I popped it outside in the cold and brought  the red one inside, and it’s started flowering now. Isn’t it beautiful? Beside it is a little Chinese Money Plant that another friend gave me as a tiny baby plantlet, an offshoot of her own plant, and it’s thriving and is now having babies of its own. In fact about half of these pot plants were cuttings or gifts from friends.

Here are the plants ranged along the bookshelf in my bedroom, looking out onto the grey bare trees outside, and keeping me cheerful no matter what the weather. 

That little splash of red beyond the claret and white cyclamen and the maidenhair fern is an anthurium, which has glossy green leaves and red bracts. As you can see, everything is doing well.