...hundreds of completely new cultivars, all grown from seed. Foliage, perfume and blooms can all be quite different to anything you have seen before. The gene mix can have been planned, or can be by open pollination. No one will know until the seedling flowers what the outcome might be. http://www.coralcoastfrangipani.com/freefrangipostcards/index.html

The image shown here was an Aussie Fruit Salad seedling, crossed with a Singapore Evergreen. We've managed to pick up the petal shape of Singapore Evergreen, with the foliage of Fruit Salad (slightly wavy edges on leaves) with some amazing new colours from neither parent!

Going back a few years, the first area to be used for cross-pollination purposes was 'sheepyard gulley' ~ a strip of land between the sheep yard and the driveway. Lots of my brand new evergreen sub-species were created here, both by me and by mother nature. I started by rooting about a dozen large branches of Singapore Evergreen, inter-planted with branches of bright-flowering rubras, including Fruit Salad, Cooktown Sunset and a local and very popular cerise. I crossed both to and from these young trees, while they were still only chest high. I tagged all the evergreens, from T1 through to T8, noting for future reference what pollen went where.

Now my old cross-pollination strip has become a huge tall perfumed hedge. A bit too high to start swapping pollen between flowers, I think!

Here is my 'office' and work station. It's a handy spot, right in the middle of the action, and yes, there's a bar fridge in here, so it is quite a social area too!

The first seedlings went into this bottom paddock on Australia Day 2006, and this image shows what you see today - 29th April 2009 - from the roof of the gazebo.

Another view from the roof. Here you should see some 'bald' patches, where trees that didn't prove to be anything spectacular have been removed and passed on to beautify our town - some are now 'rainbow trees'!

We are heading towards winter now, but some trees are still showing a few blooms, and the Pudicas and the 6-petal stenophylla will flower all through winter, creating splashes of bright white amongst the less inspiring rubras. Interestingly, some seedling trees don't go dormant, as cuttings-grown trees do. They just slow down, retaining a fair amount of foliage, and even the odd bloom.