Thursday 9 February 2012

MELBOURNE STREET TREES 8

Tamarix parviflora (synonym: T. tetrandra) is a species of tamarisk known by the common name small-flower tamarisk. It is native to southeastern Europe but it is well-known elsewhere, such as western North America, where it is an invasive introduced species, South Africa and Australia. It easily inhabits moist habitat, especially in saline soils. It is a shrub or tree growing up to about 5 meters tall. The branching twigs are covered in tiny linear leaves no more than 2 or 3 millimeters long. The inflorescence is a dense spike flowers 1 to 4 centimeters long. Each tiny flower has four pink petals.


This is a relatively uncommon tree in most gardens and streets of Melbourne except in the seaside suburbs where it is met upon more frequently on account of its resistance to salt-laden wind and saline soils.


This post is part of the Floral Friday Fotos meme.




12 comments:

  1. Beautiful blooms on this tree.

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  2. You can almost smell the perfume Nick, no wonder the bees love them.

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  3. The flowers are so attractive! What a pity the plant is sometimes invasive.

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  4. Beautiful sequence of shots. Thanks for the invitation to post to your flower meme. At the moment I don't have time to add any memes and I'm having major computer issues so I may not even be blogging for a few days depending on how things go. Happy almost weekend!

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  5. Lovely! If you haven't mentioned how tiny the flowers are, I would have thought it was a giant bee! :-)

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  6. deux belles macros, et c'est pas toujours facile a faire ;)

    Publicity ;o) Every Friday (and the Weekend), The Challenge "Walk In The Street Photography"

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  7. Nick, I've seen a similar plant near the oceans here. I never stopped to figure out why -- makes sense that it is salt resistant. I love the color.

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  8. They look so inviting for those birds! And the colors are lovely too.

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  9. Pretty, soft, delicate pink in the blossoms. I imagine this attracts butterflies as well.

    IRIS I played along with Floral Friday this week. To view my share, you will need to scroll down on the blog post a bit.

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  10. What a lovely capture of the bee on this lovely flower. Can't wait until we get some spring flowers in Texas. A ways off yet I am afraid

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  11. looking at the bee, these flowers must be tiny -but beautiful!

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