Purple/Pink/White Pelagonia

Many years ago, back when I used to go camping (sigh), when GPS units first came out, I hired a GPS unit from some where over near Bayswater. Back then GPS units were expensive. So expensive that regular folk like me could only hire them—we couldn’t afford to buy one. From memory even hiring one for two weeks was about $150. This was about 15 years ago.

Anyway, when I was over picking up the GPS unit I noticed this amazing purple, pink, and white coloured plant at the front of the building. The colours of the flower were truly eye-catching.

I am not that into flowering plants but for some reason I snapped a bit off this plant and put it in the car. Then about three or four days later when I was cleaning the car out, probably starting to get ready for the camping trip, I came across this bit I had snapped off. So I quickly scooped some dirt up into a pot, stuck the ‘cutting’ in the pot, and soaked it with water.

Well it survived and has since been split twice more so we have three of these pelagonia bushes growing in pots.

As you can see from the picture above the actual ‘bush’ is a bit of mess. The branches are all crooked like a person’s hand all stuffed up from arthritis, and leaves are relatively scarce so it looks spindly and like it needs more foliage.

But the colours of the flowers are awesome.

The colours range from almost pure white in the centre to soft pink, through to a deep burnt purple with everything from neon pink to wine-red in between.

I have no idea what the flowering cycle of this plant is but I would say that it flowers three or four times a year. I have heard about some plants that flower with each change of season so maybe it is one of those.

From time to time I have done searches on the Web for pelagonia’s and there are pictures of them up there, but I have never found one that had the colours that mine has.

This picture is possibly slightly overexposed because I used spot-metering and took the spot reading from the middle of the petal in the centre of the picture. But I have left it over-exposed because if I had wound the exposure down in post processing then the dark area would have gone to black. But they are not black in ‘real’ life; they are a very burnt sort of purple—so the colours are pretty close to correct.