Yellow Daisies

I have been doing a horticulture course one evening a week. One of our recent assignments was to make a herbarium. For the assessment we were required to collect specimens from 10 different exotic species used in amenity horticulture, including trees, shrubs and climbers. I wasn't the smartest (in terms of doing the assessment) as I just went out and found ten specimens that I had no idea what most of them were, and then I was confronted with the challenge of finding out! Which was good, because I learned a lot, but was not so good for my assessment as I struggled to positively identify all ten specimens. Oh well! During my research, trying to identify my specimens, google kindly directed me to a neat wee blog Living a Good North Coast Life. The author has this brilliant idea where each week she finds something interesting out in nature, photographs it and shares about it on her blog, and then encourages her readers to go out and do the same. And to share links to their post on hers, so that everyone can all check out each others finds :) I really like this idea, and I need some motivation to get things going here again, so I'm keen to take part.

So here is something I thought was neat, that I discovered on Sunday. I had to go back later to take photos as I didn't have my camera with me at the time.

If you're walking down Rock's Road, heading towards the port, just past the beach, you round a corner where there is a little bit of a garden between the road and the footpath. If you are driving, you probably only see the pohutukawa trees, as the road is a little higher than the footpath and the garden. There are a few benches for people to sit on, some young pohutukawa trees and a lot of yellow daisies.

 At this time of year, the yellow daisy flowers are pretty much past it although there are still a few out. 

But a lot of them have gone to seed now. I've never paid much attention to the seeds before, but I was sitting on one of the benches, and I noticed this flower head next to me which had gone to seed. It was full of little red 'flowers'. 

Some plants have seeds with little parachutes to help carry them on the wind (think dandelions). These seeds were like that, but each seed had a little red, flower shaped parachute. 

Very pretty.

If you want to check out what interesting things others have shared this week, you can go to Reconnect with Nature to find out :)