In a Maltese garden

To me, as to many of you, I suspect, a poinsettia plant is one that we buy for the Christmas season.  Indeed, they often appear on Christmas cards nowadays, don't they?

I have, in the past, managed to keep one alive for a couple of years, but not much longer than that.  How about you?

You can imagine my delight, then, when I spotted poinsettia trees in even the smallest gardens whilst on holiday in Malta this January :-)

This is one in the front garden of a small block of flats.  This leads me to assume that they are very easy to look after, as I never saw anyone tending their gardens in the three weeks I was there.

I think this is a hibiscus, which has been trained over an arched trellis.  You can see ripe, luscious lemons, ready to drop from the tree behind the blue netting.  Amazingly, we saw so many oranges, lemons and grapefruit rotting on the ground.  Clearly the owners of those trees neither drink gin and tonic, nor make fresh salad dressings or fruit smoothies!!

This was a small, courtyard garden, largely given over to fruit trees.  I was pleased to see that the soil here was not littered with fallen fruit.

Some time ago I asked if any of you could identify some leaves that I had acquired as part of a bouquet of flowers.  I was intrigued by the fact that the flowers appeared both underneath, and on top of, the leaves themselves.  You can imagine my surprise to see these plants growing in swathes.  Not only are the flowers there, to enable me to identify it, but such glorious, ruby berries too!  I still don't know what they are, but, again, they must be easy to grow, and probably worth bearing in mind if we are set to have longer, drier summers - after all, Malta has really hot summers!