Bottle Brush Tree

Ok. This post needs some background.

One of the photography sites I like to check out is Cyndie Planck's blog, Digitalalterations. She takes photos like I want to when I grow up. Go check it out.

So last night, I was cruising some of the web sites that she links on her blog, and there was one blog, Daily Pictures From South Africa, whose authors posted a picture of a bottle brush trees' blooms, and asked if they grow in other parts of the world. It's on their Tuesday, October 10th, post.

It inspired me to put these up. I took these behind the Melbourne, Florida public library this past weekend.

In my case, the tree caught my eye because of it's zany growing pattern. These are trees that will go to great lengths to do whatever it can to be in good sun. We used to have one in our front yard that was apparently too much in the shade of a bigger tree so it started growing sideways to try to get more sun.

I think this tree I took photos of however, started growing sideways because it's in an open area with winds almost always blow from the east, so the tree grew toward the west. Several other trees nearby were growing with a definite westward tilt too.

The bottle brush trees just started blooming down here so the blooms aren't as full or as bright or as numerous as they will be in a week or two.

Anyway, here's my pics of the bottle brush tree. The reason it's called that should be obvious from the shape of the blooms.

The big clump at the right of the photo is the base/roots of the tree. The two main branches are growing leftward in the picture, with the one main branch touching ground and lifting back up again. Cool.