The Pohutukawa tree is New Zealand’s Christmas Tree, coming into flower at exactly the right time. Here’s our tree, the one which was topped a while back (see earlier post), five days before Christmas.
One morning, after a period of light, misty rain, the flowers were looking spectacular. Light was being reflected back towards me from small water droplets, a collection of tiny prisms showing rainbow colours. I tried hard to capture that in a photograph, without success. But I did get some nice shots of the flowers:
Shortly after Christmas we had some heavy rain and high winds, fatal for the Pohutukawa’s display. Here’s where many of the flowers ended up after that:
By 4 January the tree was almost back to normal.
(Note the colour of the water in Nelson Haven. We had just experienced some really heavy rain and it takes a while for the bay to clear up. Not good news for baby scallops, trying to settle in the fine sediment deposited all across the bay.)
Soon we will enjoy millions of tiny, very sharp seeds all over our deck. It pays to sweep the deck chairs before sitting down!
