A lovely garland

Here is a look at a single day's yield from the floral department in our garden.

Most of the flowers in display are well known to everyone. So skipping them, I will come straight to the saffron/orange colored ones called 'Kanakambaram' in my mother tongue and referred as 'Firecracker' flower in English. These flowers look best when strung together in a stranded fashion.

As wiki points out, kanakambaram is an evergreen shrub which flowers all through the year and propagates via the seeds that form once the flower stalk dries. The seeds explode from the pod (thus getting its English name ) and grow into shrubs when they land in the soil. This is why,if you plant one single firecracker shrub and leave them be,you are sure to find them taking over the entire area to themselves.

Luckily for us, we have a patch of land in the west side of our property which is not easily accessible and quite narrow to work up anything in that area.We planted one single kanakambaram shrub there but it quickly died after producing just about a dozen flowers. We grieved over its death but did not replace it as we felt that the soil is the main culprit for the plant's death. Its just been a year since then and now to our surprise we have at least 12 kanakambaram shrubs growing in that area. All seeded from that one single shrub we had planted. They have started producing flowers profusely.We would be happy even if they take up the entire area in the west as we quite like these flowers and looks like they dont demand too much in terms of nutrients too. We have a couple of jasmine plants as well, so come summer,imagine how lovely these two would look together when strung into a strand.