plant 2

Gardening’s a funny thing – I do very little of it, though more than I used to, and just enough to keep plants alive, though not enough to get them to thrive. A bit like my investment in my own life, really. Certainly the hands-on stuff affects your outlook on the garden and vegetable world, it tends to wipe out the Rousseauian romanticism (born, apparently, of Rousseau’s physical myopia), the grand vistas, the rambling landscapes, and replace it with close-ups of leaf-curl, Aphidoidea and black spot, and questions around nitrogen, lime and friability..

You gain, you lose, you try to hold onto it all.

So onto plant number 2. Right next to the pincushion flowers is a smaller groundhugger plant with tiny purple fan-like flowers. The flowers, if not the leaves, are very like Scaevola hookeri, the petals having an unusual squaring off at the ends, but Scaevola hookeri flowers are white to pale lilac whereas these flowers are darker, and the leaves aren’t glossy. Also Scaevola h is alpine to sub-alpine.

Still, I think it’s likely to be just that. Scaevola h (family Goodeniaceae) is an Australian native. This, I think, was another plant given to me by someone in our housing co-op, and many of them are into natives. It’s unusually dark, but the leaves are glossy enough. Maybe this is a hybrid, created for hardier climes. I wonder how it’ll go over summer.

My picture’s the out of focus one – which is unusual, my camera’s normally pretty reliable, though I’m not.