Banksia serrata flower progression

[Grant Bowie]

Hi all,

The flowers are maturing on one of my Banksia serrata.

About 10 flowers got to the starting stage 1 but only 3 went on to expand.

Here is the progression so far.

1 Starting out.JPG

2 Expanding.JPG

3 Flowers emerging.JPG

4 Flowers elongating.JPG

Thats it so far.

Grant

[mugen]

Wow first time I have seen banksia flower as a bonsai

[Joel]

Ok ok enough with the teasing Where's the shot of the whole tree?

Thanks Grant!
Joel

[Petra]

hmmm. didnt think the flowers would reduce. Or am i wrong to suspect it may be of normal size.

[Joel]

hmmm. didnt think the flowers would reduce. Or am i wrong to suspect it may be of normal size.

Flowers don't reduce but you are looking at an inflorescence - made up of thousands of small flowers packed together tightly. Each of those flowers are the same size but the length of the spike inflorescence is reduced. This is common with inflorescences and the same thing happens with Callistemon etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflorescense

Joel

[Grant Bowie]

Ok ok enough with the teasing Where's the shot of the whole tree?

Thanks Grant!
Joel

The whole tree is nothing special at the moment as I am growing it on into a very large bonsai.

I will post photos in a progression later.

Grant

[Roger]

Mugen
Here is a pic of a banksia in flower in a pot as bonsai.

It's from nursery stock in 1997 and the photo was taken in 2009. Height is around 40 cm.

[mugen]

Thanks for posting the shot of the tree Roger
Love the pot very nice display of flowers

[Roger]

The pot is one of my early ones where I was experimenting with side drainage holes. They generally work OK and add a sense of growing on or in a rock basin where drainage can be quite different than in deep soils.