Missing my roomie!
I think we all need a Deborah update. What does Deborah do when a world-wide travel ban messes up all of her plans?
You obviously haven’t been following my journal. I’ve been on xanthorrhoea watch. Seventeen years ago I planted three baby xanthorrhoeas. They don’t like being transplanted and usually die. Two survived, and gradually grew. Xanthorrhoeas are also called grass trees. They start with one leaf. After they’re a couple of years old they get three leaves (this is when I got mine). After twenty years they may have enough leaves that they form a hemisphere, and begin to grow a trunk (the trunk is actually leaves), at the rate of a centimetre or two a year (less than an inch). Mine are just at the stage that the trunk may be beginning to form.
We had fires this year. For four months I was stuck indoors because of all the smoke, and for a number of days during that time the air pollution station a few streets away recorded the worst pollution on earth. For a few weeks I could see the fires from my house. We are usually one of the cleanest places on earth.
Xanthorrhoeas flower when there is fire, and rarely otherwise. In fact, they rarely flower. Every Xanthorrhoea in my part of Australia is flowering now. Every national park I’ve been to lately has masses of flowering xanthorrhoea. It is absolutely the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. Especially when the park has been badly burnt in the fires, like most of the parks around here were.
Even one of my xanthorrhoea is flowering. I’m taking pictures of it every day and putting them on my journal. The flower spike is now 1.22 metres above the plant, and the flowers still haven’t opened, after 29 days. So, although the flower spike is growing really fast, the flowers are taking their time, just like the plant itself does.
Apart from that,
@happy and I have been having a wonderful time regularly camping in national parks together for a couple of days at a time. We’re gradually visiting parks we’ve never seen. Although the borders are closed between states here, there are over 300 National Parks in the state/area so we’ve got plenty of options.