Photos of our burnt plants

Thought I'd show you some photos of the damage done by our hottest day on record last week.  45.6 degrees about 25% humidity and 60 km an hour winds. Except for the parsley, all these plants are in our front yard, face west, are drought tolerant and are watered every second day in summer.

The interesting thing is that after that day we had about 6 days of torrential rain. The humidity went through the roof and the plants and the lawn greened up so fast we thought someone had put super fertiliser over everything. All the bright green leaves are new growth that has sprung up over the last couple of days.

The cordyline was prolific and was watered well on the morning of the heatwave.  The kangaroo paw plant next to it (you can see a couple of green sticks) also had a lot of foliage.

This cordyline, as you can see, was once massive. I'm not sure if I can save it.

This giant birds nest fern is about 20 years old and is still a baby as far as these ferns go. I put shade cloth over it in the morning and gave it a big drink but you can see that the outer leaves were burnt.

This is a lilly pilli tree. It is an Australian native that, like a lot of our native trees, has an inbuilt defence mechanism against the hot summer days. If you look at the base of the tree you will see a lot of dead leaves.  If the tree is in a hot zone and feels threatened it will stop allowing sap to travel to the outer leaves and keeps it in the trunk of the tree where it acts to hydrate the heart of the tree. It would have to be a very long drought to kill one of these.

burnt leaves of the lilly pilli

The parsley was still a bit sick from the white grub attack. I watered it in the morning but by the afternoon the soil was as dry as if I hadn't .
Luckily, as you can see, it is greening up nicely after all the rain we've had.