Saturday, July 12, 2008

Proteas

Before we moved to Cape Town, I had never seen protea flowers. Here they're everywhere. Apparently most of the flowers in the Protea genus can be found in the Cape Floral Kingdom, and a few others are scattered around the southern hemisphere. It's the middle of winter here, so it's not peak season by any means, but we saw all of the flowers below in an afternoon walk today.

The first three pictures in this series are from the same plant. I think they're three stages of development of the same flower.






Melissa

3 comments:

Sommer said...

beautiful! do bromelaids grow there?

Melandy Koosinger said...

What are bromelaids?

Andy said...

No bromeliads here - at least not native ones. Evidently they're almost completely North and South American, with one genus in central Africa. I remember seeking them out at the nursery when I was a kid - cool plants.